Kanye West Monster Muppet Remix

Watch the Throne

How about this show? Jay-Z and Kanye West are performing as a duo at the Palace of Auburn Hill in September. I've never seen Kanye live but Jay-Z's free show at Cobo Hall in 2008--a get-out-the-Obama-vote event--stands out as one of the best concert experiences of my life. J and K plan to release a collaborative, long-talked-about record called "Watch the Throne" next month. I've avoided the snippets and leaks, preferring to wait until the whole thing is available (August 8). Expectations couldn't be higher, due not only to the quality of the individual output of the two artists, but also due to their past collaborations: Kanye got his start producing Jay-Z's classic record "The Blueprint." Have they rapped together? Um, yeah. Does Roc Boys ring a bell? How about Monster?

Live from New York

This weekend I devoured the book Live from New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live. For the pop culture enthusiast, this is the ultimate stay up past bedtime (and, in my case, don't get those student papers graded) tome. Shales and Miller include plenty of gossip and talk to virtually every living writer and cast member (Eddie Murphy refused to participate) about the drugs, the politics, the music, the rivalries, and the attempt to maintain a countercultural ethos in the face of success. But aside from the juicy stories about cocaine, the text also has so much to say about the relationship that SNL has established with its audience. I liked learning that Chevy Chase--the closest the book has to a villain--turned down Animal House because of his rivalry with Belushi and his disinterest in doing what he saw as an ensemble comedy when he could be a leading man in Foul Play instead. But I liked even more the opportunity to recall my own history with the show. That's the genius of the book: the ability to entertain the part of you interested in the salacious details, the part of you interested in a cultural history of the 70s-through the present, and the part of you that wants to connect your own story with the story of a pop culture behemoth.

My brother Steve had an SNL record with skits from the first cast and as a little kid, say eight or nine years old, I loved a lot of movies with people I knew were SNL people: "Meatballs" with Bill Murray, "Foul Play" with Chevy Chase, that kind of thing. So by the time I could convince my body to stay up late enough to watch the show, I did. I remember watching Eddie Murphy in the Gumby assassination skits, and the bit where Tim Kazurinky is married to the chimp. I must have been ten years old. I can remember my older brother and sister coming home (they were college age then) and I was just kind of chilling out with SNL. An essential ritual. Years later, I went off to seminary at age 14 and most of the priests were sort of vaguely left-leaning, and they were that generation that saw SNL as something radical, so ordering pizza and staying up to watch SNL was encouraged. The "Wayne's World" years, although my favorite skit back then was Sprockets. A bunch of Catholic teen-aged boys living away from home, contemplating the priesthood, and the show was, once again, a ritual (in a lifestyle and a belief system full or rituals).

First year of college, my friend Jason and I were seeing some bands play at Grounds Coffeehouse one Saturday night and I remember walking through Detroit to get home, me and Jason, trying to make the opening of SNL. That was the night Sinead O'Connor tore up the picture of the Pope. There we were, in the front room of a home where Catholic missionaries lived, watching this shocking thing. After college, first year of grad school, I was earning some extra money cleaning the Youngstown YMCA, working nights, and I remember watching the Christmas episode of SNL in one of the workout rooms while mopping the floors: Molly Shannon sniffing her underarms as the Catholic schoolgirl. Depressing job, but there was that ritual, that constant. I can't believe people don't watch SNL, that people didn't grow up with this crazy, occasionally smart program. The cliche is how the quality varies year to year, cast to cast, a theme this book tackles of course, but even during down years, nothing captures the moment quite like SNL. Yeah, I wish the show still did the avant garde stuff they did during the 70s (look, Sun Ra is on this week!), but I still set the DVR.

Shales and Miller have somehow created a book that does about eight things at once, not the least of which is appealing personally and affectively to the obsessive fan. Check it out folks.

Revisionist History

Thanks to Pop Matters for publishing my essay about hair metal's punk roots.

De Stijl

Thanks to The Rumpus for publishing my essay about the White Stripes.

Small Conferences

Every spring my field puts on a big conference that attracts thousands of scholars of rhetoric and writing. Most years I attend and many years (i.e., when my proposal gets the thumbs-up), I give a paper. Typically, I also go listen to lots of other papers, go out to dinner at least once or twice with my friends from graduate school, attend parties sponsored by textbook publishers ("enjoy free drinks and finger food and, by the way, please make your students by our stuff"), meet with the rest of the editorial staff of a journal whose board I sit on, attend a breakfast for writing program administrators, attend my graduate program's annual party, and collect free stuff from the publisher's display area.

Right now I'm sitting in the airport in State College, Pennsylvania, having just attended a much more intimate gathering of colleagues. I gave a paper based on the research I was conducting in Beirut. I listened to other papers. But know what else? I met a boatload of people I never met before. I connected with senior scholars. I had a lot of conversations and took a lot of notes and got a lot of ideas. There's a perennial conversation about whether my field's big conference has gotten too big and outgrown its usefulness. I'm not sure how I feel about this, but the thing is, I don't go so far as to say the big gig isn't useful mainly because I like seeing old friends. As far as a professional experience, the small conference is where it's at. And Penn State does a great job putting on a small conference.

"I just don't get the appeal"

I've been thinking a lot about pop culture since I got back to the U.S., a place no doubt consumed with consuming. Surrounded by the music I listen to on my laptop (Nas and The Kills yesterday) while I work and the "Big Love Season 4" discs Nicole and I have been watching in the evening, I experience both connection and disconnection when I walk into my classes and lead discussions with my students about mass culture. We are all critics and consumers. We critique and we consume.

And while I am interested in how the stuff I like shapes me, I'm also curious about why particular pop culture artifacts do absolutely nothing for me. I just don't get the appeal. A few examples:

• video games
• tv shows about judges (Judge Judy, People's Court, etc)
• hockey
• Kid Rock
• Lord of the Rings
• celebrity reality shows (e.g., Kardashians)

By acknowledging two of these non-affinities, I run the risk of having my Michigan residency revoked. Fun fact: you can get kicked out of Oakland County for disliking Kid Rock and hockey. But there it is. I've got to be honest. If the pop culture we love paints our backgrounds, than how about the artifacts we just don't "get"? In what distant but so-close (too close) galleries do they reside?

The Top Five I.R.S.-Era R.E.M. Music Videos

The Top Five I.R.S.-Era R.E.M. Music Videos

Over at PopMatters, A.J. Ramirez shares five great aural and visual moments from REM's classic I.R.S. years. One could quibble with the exclusion of Radio Free Europe, but why bother? Those early REM albums influenced the junior high me as much as novels like On the Road and The Stand did. REM made music for those of us shaped not only by family and religion and school but also by books and films and records. See also Patton Oswalt's essay (from this book) about working as a movie projectionist, which he "soundtracks" with REM's Fables album.

The New Pornographers - Moves

When the dream became reality, reality got rocked.

Summer Teaching Etc.

My summer mini-semester began today. A whole semester crammed into six weeks. I have a section of first-year writing and a section of advanced exposition, so I have four relatively full days in the classrooms per week. I have my students following an ongoing news story of their choosing and writing about how the press covers the issue. Luckily, only a few seem to have chosen the Casey Anthony verdict.

In addition to teaching, playing with my new computer (a MacBook Pro) has occupied my hours. Took me a long time to get around to switching to the Mac. Bit of a learning curve, but mostly the machine has been a pleasure to use. First things on my new i-Tunes account? The new Kills album, Blood Pressures, which is outstanding. Also, "Monster" by Kanye West and a Motley Crue compilation. Looking forward to figuring out iPhoto and iDVD.

This weekend, I'm off to the Penn State Rhetoric Conference to give a paper. Hope to see a lot of colleagues and friends. But I can't believe I'm getting on a plane so soon after the neverending Beirut-to-Detroit trip last week.

Non-Academic Reading Part Three

While overseas this past year, I logged here and here some of the things I read. Given the mystical nature of the number of three, why not post a third list?

--Nujood Ali with Delphine Minoui, I Am Nujood, Age 10 and Divorced
--Margeurite van Gueldermalsen, Married to a Bedouin
--Mahmoud Darwish, The Music of Human Flesh

Aging Rock Stars

On one hand, it's odd to see--as I did last night with my friends Jim and Janice--the members of Motley Crue take the stage amid massive pyrotechnics and proceed to bang their heads. On the other hand, what are they going to do, become accountants? I don't know if I realized that bands still go so far over the top. The Crue (now that I've seen them live, I can use the shorthand) brings out go-go dancers, shoots off fireworks, and keeps the dry ice industry in business. They play every single they've ever released ("We're going to play your favorite songs," singer Vince Neil announced), along with anachronistic-seeming drum and guitar solos. Drummer, reality tv star, and celebrity sex tape impresario Tommy Lee's drum kit is strapped to a roller coaster track that spins in a loop so he can play upside down. You can't look away.

Until you see Motley Crue live, you forget about the depth of their catalogue. They played hits for two hours. You also forget about the quality of their early tracks. "Shout at the Devil" is unimpeachable. Unlike an indie rock show, a Motley Crue concert focuses on entertainment and pleasure. Period. You can't help but have fun. The only moment of irony occurs during the montage of crowd photos that plays like a slide show on the big screen behind the band late in the show. Dudes flashing devil horns. Women showing cleavage. (Mostly) 40-something fans drinking in the parking lot. All during a song called "Too Young To Fall In Love." Priceless.

Two bands opened the show. Poison, slightly more "hair metal" and slightly less edgy than the headliners, did a short set, predictably heavy on familiar singles like "Talk Dirty to Me." When singer Bret Michaels--Tommy Lee's colleague in the world of reality tv--announced a song from their new album, fans were kind enough to eschew verbal disappointment. The song ended up being a cover of "We're An American Band." The evening opened with a thirty-minute set from 70s legends the New York Dolls, who no doubt influenced both of the more famous bands that played. I've seen the Dolls several times but enjoyed hearing classics like "Pills" and "Personality Crisis." The Dolls brought a little rock critic credibility to the evening and in some ways were an odd fit ("Strange to have a punk band open the show," Janice observed) but fit right in with the glam ethos of the Crue in particular.

Patti Smith Group - Pale Blue Eyes/Louie Louie

R.E.M. - See No Evil (1985)

Radiohead - Just (Live at Reading Festival 1994)

More Non-Academic Reading

I posted a list like this back in December. Here are some things I've read since then...

--Patton Oswalt, Zombie Spaceship Wasteland
--Ann Patchet, Bel Canto
--Ann Patchet, The Magician's Assistant
--Melissa Rossi, What Every American Should Know about the Middle East
--William Golding, An Egyptian Journal
--Colette Rossant, Apricots on the Nile: A Memoir with Recipes
--Michael Avi-Yonah et al, A History of Israel and the Holy Land
--Mahmoud Darwish, Unfortunately It Was Paradise

White Stripes, RIP

My roomate in college liked a Detroit band called Goober & The Peas, so we used to go see them play their odd country/punk around town. They had a rotating roster, but for a while their drummer was a kid younger than us. A couple years later he switched to guitar and changed his name to Jack White. After I grew up, his band, The White Stripes, got me re-invested in new music. By the late 90s, I was married and spending my time getting a PhD, not listening to bands. Plus, rock and roll seemed pretty boring anyway. Linkin Park, that kind of thing.

I lived in Tucson then, but read the Detroit papers online, and they were starting to talk about this band that played Captain Beefheart covers and had hokey elements like dressing in red and white. Their sense of fun knocked me over, hokey or not. I listened to "De Stijl," their best in my opinion, on repeat while helping my friend Hung tow a 1940 Cadillac from New Orleans to Los Angeles around Christmas, 2001. We drove a huge red dumptruck and when it was my turn to drive and Hung's turn to sleep, Hung had to get us to an entrance ramp and point us in the right direction because I was pretty shaky when it came to making turns in that monster. That's what I think of when I hear "Hello Operator" and "You're Pretty Good Lookin for a Girl." Towing a 1940 Caddy across Texas--a pretty good video for the old-fashioned music.

Nicole and I saw them live in Tucson, at the Hotel Congress, in early 2002, while I was finishing up my dissertation. There were lots of kids at the show. Not college kids, little kids. I felt kind of creepy, a 20-something among all these middle-schoolers getting dropped off by their parents. They opened with "Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground" and the guitar was impossibly loud and sweaty. No setlist. Jack would just nod at Meg and she'd know what he meant. When they quieted down for "We're Gonna Be Friends," with all those young kids there, miles from Washington where our country was getting ready to go to war with half the Middle East, that was a totally unironic, tender moment. Seems like a week or two later, they were being played on the radio, alongside crap, and they were on the MTV awards show doing "Fell In Love With A Girl."

We moved to Southwest Ohio a few months later for my first professor job--speaking of growing up--and, 2002, 2003, those were the final years of the independent Oxford, Ohio, radio station WOXY. And WOXY had good final years: The White Stripes were in heavy rotation, plus Gossip (before they became a dance band), Sleater Kinney, the local band The Greenhornes, Bloc Party, The Kills when they first started up, Flaming Lips and Wilco had popular records then, the British punk band the Libertines. I taught a lot of English majors during those years and we were listening to the same music. Lots of good English major music during 02-03. And the Stripes were the gateway to a lot of their friends' bands in Detroit: the Dirtbombs, the Detroit Cobras, the Electric 6, and a long list of others. Those bands had their fifteen minutes, and now they continue to make fun and energetic, non-hipster music on a smaller stage. Nicole and I saw the Stripes one more time, probably in early 2003 in Cincinnati. More popular now, still playing the same songs, and no less committed to that vision of a guitar, drums, and voice.

I didn't like "Elephant," "Get Behind Me Satan," and "Icky Thump" quite as much as their first records. Sure, songs like "Seven Nation Army" and "Blue Orchid" became anthems, but they no longer sounded like the only songs of their kind. Mainly, I guess, because everybody else was imitating Jack White. And the band was name-dropped in the movie School of Rock. And Metallica covered "Seven Nation Army." And they band shared a stage with Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones. Like Nirvana ten years earlier, the band represented a weird moment when something from the underground takes a peak at the sunlight. And that's not a bad thing, because more people get to partake in something real.

The band broke up a few weeks back and that's a shame. Listening to their music reminded me that just because I'm married and have a real job doesn't mean I have to grow up.

Non-Academic Reading

Anybody still reading this blog? I've mostly moved blog operations over to Beirut Bill, my travel blog about the year I am spending in the Middle East. I hope if you are reading this, you'll also check out and bookmark the Beirut blog, where I post at least a few times a week.

Anyway, here's a post that has little to do with my life and work abroad. A list of non-academic stuff I've read since leaving the U.S.

-Edward Said, Out of Place (Said's memoir)
-Leila Ahmed, A Border Passage: From Cairo to America A Woman's Journey (also memoir)
-Stephen King, Just After Sunset (a hit or miss short story collection--the hits are really good and the misses are few)
-Agatha Christie, Death on the Nile
-Agatha Christie, Murder in Mesopotamia
-Agatha Christie, Murder is Easy
-Emma Donoghue, Room (loved this novel very much)
-Misc. poems from Jim Daniels' Blessing the House, Naomi Shihab Nye's Words Under the Words, Inclined to Speak: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab-American Poetry, and Michael Dennison's Hamra Noir (I tend to read around in these)

other pastures

Here is a link to my new blog. I'll tell the story of my year abroad on the new site, so bookmark the page, become a "follower" of the new blog, leave me comments, and stay in touch while I'm in Lebanon. I'll be posting pictures and keeping the new site updated on a regular basis.

Also, Nicole will tell her stories too, so keep her site bookmarked as well: Nicole Abroad

vacation

What a couple of weeks. In the midst of Lebanon preparations, got to enjoy what felt like a real summer. My nephew Tony came to Detroit for a few days and we hiked the Dequinder Pass, ate some of Detroit's finest offerings (Tomatoes Apizza, Priya, the taco trucks in Mexicantown), and caught the Dead Weather's amazing, loud, high energy concert. The band takes the stage to one of my favorite songs on the p.a. and then pretty much rocks through its entire catalogue. Not many indie bands have the musicianship of the Dead Weather, especially the vocal chops of Alison Mosshart. Great time.

Then, down to West Virginia to celebrate my parents' 50th anniversary. They rented a cabin and we enjoyed about five days of loads and loads of fun. Board games and huge family meals in the cabin, a ton of swimming and hiking, and a trivia game about life in 1960, when the happy couple married. My brother, sister, and I went together on a collaborative present (new stone steps for the front porch at their house), which was more of a hit than a comemmorative plate or something would have been. Despite losing electricity for half a day, the trip was just about perfect. Most days included a long hike in the morning, swimming through most of the afternoon, a visit to the gym in the everning, and a short walk in the evening, so it was kind of like "The Biggest Loser" but with lots of carbs in the cabin.

On the way from West Virginia to Columbus--where we were dropping off Tony at his University--we had a blowout on the highway. With six nieces and nephews on board. Luckily nobody was hurt. We were pulling off the freeway when the tire blew, thank God, but had we been going full speed...yikes. A quick change and a visit to Sears for a new tire had us back on the road. Lots of adventures, pictures, and memories.