Don't let your flowers freeze

I spent the weekend at the annual meeting of US branch of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music. My talk was well-received and I heard some very compelling papers (the one on Guitar Hero was particularly fun). The generally enjoyable conference was sullied, however, by some unpleasantness that I won't really get into here, but suffice it to say that my five hour drive home gave me plenty of time to get thoroughly agitated.

So it seemed fitting that I returned home to see that the pretty flowers I put on my balcony and stupidly failed to bring inside before the chilly weekend were, well . . . dead.

Sigh.

I Want to Have Jad Abumrad's Babies

Apparently Jad Abumrad just had a birthday.  If you don't have any idea who I'm talking about, you need to get one . . . now!  I never thought it would be possible to replace Ira Glass as number one in my public radio affections, but he pulled it off about a year ago.  Check this out and you'll know why.

Thanks to him, Petula Clark has been in my head all day long.  So, here:

"Just another dead fag to you . . ."

In a couple of weeks, I'll be giving a talk called "'Rhythm is My Bitch': Kevin Aviance, Matthew Shepard, and the Embodied Music of Hate, Violence, and Healing."  As the talk is intended to discuss the musical negotiation of trauma, it is framed through my personal experience of Shepard's murder.  Specifically, it spins off of this disturbing, yet oddly liberating music video for Kevin Aviance's cover of Nitzer Ebb's "Join in the Chant:"

Because the talk is so personal, I've been thinking a lot lately about other music that has been important to me in dealing with the threat of violence toward people expressing sexual or gender difference.  This has been particularly potent today, as I gave my castrati lecture to my Intro to Music class.  That's, perhaps, another post entirely.

At any rate, tonight I remembered Tori Amos's "Taxi Ride" from her album Scarlet's Walk, with its repeated statement: "Just another dead fag to you, that's all.  Just another light missing on this long taxi ride."  As usual, in this song, Amos conflates a personal experience with a powerful political message.  

But what struck me upon listening to the song tonight was the change in the repeat of the line from " . . . taxi ride" to " . . . taxi line."  I long ago gave up trying to read any sort of cohesive "meaning" in Amos's lyrics--her poetic art consists of obscure references and esoteric juxtapositions.  Yet this change gave me chills that I could quite clearly identify.  The album is, in a lot of ways, a creepy Americana.  It evokes traveling . . . in this case, traveling across a country that is "home," yet rendered foreign via regressive social and political trends so extreme that they make the familiar incomprehensible.  "Taxi Ride" fits this notion quite well.  But the change from "ride" to "line" transfers a personal image to a communal, yet anonymous one.  Most of us have experienced taxi lines.  They are innocuous enough, but they do serve as unexpected symbols of common experience (traveling) confronting individual experience (to where are the other people traveling?).

As a survivor of a seemingly random and anonymous act of violence, this subtle change really haunts me.  It makes me think about the nature of "community," particularly within a culture that continually (maybe increasingly) accepts violence as a means to resolve differences.  To put it bluntly and in terms of my own experience, as much as we might try to approach every interaction from an open and accepting perspective, you never know who's carrying a gun under their coat.  

Here's a live performance of the Tori Song:

The Joy of Eels

I haven't mentioned yet that I attended "An Evening with Eels" at the Pantages Theater on Monday. E fills me with such immense joy that, even when he's bad, he's good. On Monday, he was pretty much wonderful, regardless.

In honor of my decade-long obsession, here's some major nostalgia:

Gigantic, Sound-Producing, Prosthetic Penis

I often joke that my primary objective when teaching is to either shock students or make them cry. I'm finding that, especially in a big lecture context like my Introduction to Music class, it's not really a joke. Sounding absurd is extremely useful.

Today I wanted to talk about Prince's Super Bowl halftime performance--you know, the one where his silhouette makes his guitar look like a big phallus that he's stroking. Before class, I was watching a clip of the performance when a colleague, watching over my shoulder, said dramatically, "androgyny is power." Androgyny isn't exactly what's going on in that performance, but I liked the way he said it.

"Miami Rain" via virtualmatter
Uploaded by virtualmatter

So, I started the class with the statement, "androgyny is power . . . if you happen to have a gigantic, sound-producing, prosthetic penis." Boom. My job was pretty much over.

The students, who, given that it was a rainy, icky Friday, probably really wished they were someplace else, were suddenly right there with me. I felt under-prepared, but it didn't matter. The students were REALLY paying attention and I was able to let them direct my discussion in a way that is often difficult in a class that size.

Plus, as I had framed the previous two lectures with consideration of Justin Timberlake, I knew they were just waiting for me to mention wardrobe malfunctions, so I could save it for a lull. As soon as it seemed like I might be losing them: "If Janet Jackson can whip out her real boob, why can't Prince whip out his symbolic penis?"

Fight the Whoville Patriarchy

I stole this from Amber's blog, but I have to say that my experience of the film adaptation of Horton Hears a Who was quite similar to that of Peter Sagal (who is close to divine, anyway). Watching the movie with my two nieces, I noted that the weird, icky gender dichotomy in the film was so explicit that somewhere, anywhere, there must be parody. I'm 95% certain it wasn't there. That I was even looking so hard in a children's film strikes me as troubling.

Klinghoffer in Class

Today I exposed my students to John Adams's controversial and, some (not me) would say, offensive The Death of Klinghoffer. I think their response was somewhat tamed by the fact that its difficult content--the Palestinian/Israeli conflict and the 1985 hijacking of the Achille Lauro--was presented in a "high art" context. Somehow, genres like opera can really distance people who aren't used to them. Some students just plain didn't like it. I think, in part, that's a gut, aesthetic response. It's weird to hear terrorists singing. Nevertheless, I think it may have placed the conflict in a new historical context for some students.

Today really demonstrated how difficult the 50-minute class is for me. Consistently, just when the conversation really starts getting interesting, I have to end class. When I teach a course like this again, I need to incorporate some kind of online discussion component.

Star Tribune on the TCGMC concert

Thanks for posting this, Luther.

It seems like William Randall Beard and I generally agree. He can just say stuff in far fewer words than I can.

Team America pedagogy?

I was nervous about using Trey Parker and Matt Stone's Team America: World Police in my class today.  I needn't have been.

The end-point of that part of the lecture (which turned out to be the whole lecture, because, as usual, I didn't rein in the discussion) used the TV show 24 to demonstrate how subtly music in film and television not only represents ethnic groups, but dictates how the narratives want us to feel about them.  I noodled about on the piano to show how, in one scene from the fourth season, the heroic "Jack Bauer" theme very quietly transforms into an ominous "arabic" theme--showing us that Bauer will, ultimately, end up in conflict with a group of people, despite the fact that we don't yet know that they are "bad guys."  I think it's actually a pretty sophisticated musical passage, at least in its capacity to play on cultural stereotypes to manipulate people's emotional responses to visual images.  It's disgusting, of course, but clever.

It occurred to me, however, that prefacing what seems to me to be a subtle practice with such a massively blatant satire of it might make it clearer.  After all, the satire of Trey Parker and Matt Stone is based entirely on magnifying cultural practices and representations.  I think it worked.  It's not hard to see how, in the opening sequence of Team America, the supposedly "value-free" cinematic musical backdrop highlights the "serene," "innocent" French music's conflict with the "scary" "Arab" music--paralleled by the little French kid singing "Frère Jacques" running into the very angry-looking terrorist. 

The only problem is that I fear I might have duplicated the very process I was trying to critique.  Using the satire may well have dictated how the students responded to 24.  I don't think I'm obligated to eliminate my viewpoints from the class, but I hope I didn't compel anyone not to speak.  The discussion was excellent, regardless, and didn't just amount to a series of repetitions of what I had said, which can sometimes happen with touchy subjects.  

I'll use Team America again.  I just might need to rethink how I frame it.