like the moon
Alan Lomax’s “cantometrics” has long functioned as a Pandora’s box for conversation on the SEM listserv. Yesterday and today, fairly explicitly (literally?). We’ll see what happens tomorrow. Here’s the current string, in all asynchronous argument — Alexandre Enkerli to SEM-L Mar 27 Fellow music analysts, To be honest, when a student in my anthropology of […]
Read More →On March 8-9, I’ll be participating in a Caribbean Music Seminar at Royal Holloway College (University of London). On the evening of the 8th, I’ll contribute to an open forum on Jamaican music. On the morning of the 9th, I’ll be delivering a paper about Jamaican culture, versioning, and the notion (and uses) of the […]
Read More →As I mentioned in the last post, I’m headed to London this week (tomorrow today actually!) to participate in a Caribbean music seminar at Royal Holloway College. I’m honored to have been invited to join in the proceedings, and I’m quite looking forward to the various papers, the broader conversation, and the feedback I hope […]
Read More →Went for an afternoon trip up to Devon Ave’s “Desi corridor” yesterday accompanied by an anthropologist who studies the circulation of pirated media in India (mainly Bollywood/Filmi), and who was, as you can imagine, a perfect companion for a brief tour of the strip’s numerous “record” shops (which sold CDs, DVDs, videocassettes, and even plain […]
Read More →Having read no small # of reggaeton messageboard debates (esp over ?s of nat’l origin), I’ve developed a decent sense, I’d like to think, of when someone hits a good # of signposts. The following gem is quite solid in that respect — myths, misspellings, elisions and omissions, grammatical and historical slippage notwithstanding. Econowhimsical prose, […]
Read More →Now don’t get me wrong. I don’t mean to sound like Time fckn Magazine or appear too technoptimistic. Indeed, allow me to repeat here — for those who aren’t comment readers — /jace‘s well-put and well-taken anxieties w/r/t web2point0h: i think most of web2.0 activities is lil autonomous nodes — blogs, youtube uploaders & viewers, […]
Read More →Respek to Bec (aka, “& you must be wax”), whose adventures in virtual ed have landed her in NYT, CNN, USA Today, the Boston Globe, and National Geographic (!), and who today has garnered a spot on the front page of SL’s not-so-gray lady, the Metaverse Messenger, which covers the mock trial she and Charlie […]
Read More →Saw this @ SavageMinds before it turned up ‘pon BoingBoing, but I was glad it appeared @ the latter too b/c I think it should be seen widely: not only is it interesting and inspiring, it’s cool and well-executed (& I’m pretty sure the music was made on friggin FruityLoops!). It might be hyperbolic, it […]
Read More →A couple nights ago I attended the reception for an exhibition currently showing at the Glass Curtain Gallery (Columbia College) in downtown Chicago. Curated by anthropologist art historian Deborah Stokes and entitled “Africa.dot.Com: Drums to Digital,” it is billed as “an exhibition that visually and interactively explores the collision of modern culture and technology on […]
Read More →The following is a note I sent to the SEM list in response to a thread that started with this seemingly simple query (if not so easily answered). I felt the need to add my two cents after reading this post. I’ve added a couple more links, including one to a pdf version of the […]
Read More →Much as I like to bellyache bout the NYT, you gotta love it when they let pomo philosophers pen op-eds about politricks. And even if (sadly — for all of us, not just him) Zizek’s mostly remixing his ol’ desert of the real spiel, I was totally tickled to see him — in so many […]
Read More →Last week there was a message posted to the dancecult list, which, in the process of recommending a couple of Nate Harrison’s fine videos, asserted, not uncommonly, that the Amen break was “the most sampled rhythm ever, the very foundation of most rap, techno and jungle.” Now, undoubtedly the Amen break is one of the […]
Read More →It’s that time of the semester when things get extra crunchy, so I figure I better get this post up before it all becomes ancient history (even if it means I won’t be able to offer as texty a reflection as I’d like). Our panel was first thing Thursday morning (and I mean first thing: […]
Read More →Alongside fellow Riddim Methodist, Larisa Mann (a/k/a, DJ Ripley), I’ll be “giving” a paper called “What Is Stolen? What Is Lost? Sharing Information in an Age of Litigation” at this year’s annual meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology, which is happening in Honolulu from Nov 15-19. See the program for full details on the conference, […]
Read More →Meet Hocus Opus, my Second Life avatar. It’s not that I don’t already have too much to do in my first/real life, but I confess that I’m rather excited about the possibilities for virtual, multimedia interactions — especially in the realm of ethno/music/ology — and SL seems to have the energy, resources, and critical mass […]
Read More →As noted elsewhere, this here humble blogger has been bestowed a spot in the 2006 edition of the illustrious Da Capo Best Music Writing series. What’s more, it’s one of my blog-posts — as opposed to a more traditionally “published” piece — which has earned itself the distinction. Of course, the post in question is […]
Read More →As an example of how the work of Clifford Geertz might continue to inform our understanding of (the significance of) culture, consider the following passage from William Sewell’s Logics of History (Chicago 2005), itself a compelling interpretation of a series of texts. Bringing the methods and insights of the social sciences and the ‘histories’ to […]
Read More →I’ll be discussing and demonstrating “Mashup Poetics and Pedagogical Practice” as part of the SMT Committee on Diversity Special Session at this year’s joint annual meeting of the American Musicological Society and the Society for Music Theory, which is happening in Los Angeles from Nov 2-5. See the program for full details on the conference, […]
Read More →Clifford Geertz passed away this week. An innovative and influential anthropologist, Geertz’s clear, engaging prose advanced what he called “interpretive anthropology” in the early 70s — taking a semiotic or hermeneutic approach, reading/writing culture as text, thickly describing what he called, after Weber, “webs of signficance” and interpreting them in search of meaning. It’s quite […]
Read More →On Friday, October 27 at 4pm, I’ll be giving a run-through of my paper for SEM in Honolulu as part of the UW-Madison School of Music’s pre-SEM colloquium. The talk is called “What Is Stolen? What Is Lost? Sharing Information in an Age of Litigation,” and discusses the constraints and possibilities swirling around digital media […]
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