(annual tradition!) my official recommended novel from 2006

I figure that if somebody regularly reads novels and seems like someone of compatible taste, they ought to be able to recommend one novel a year just on their say-so. "Seriously, read this." More than one and they need to sell you with actual reasons and/or a convergence of positive reviews from other people. Or else, they are being pushy, one of those people who wants to colonize your reading queue.

If somebody gets me to listen to a song and I don't like it, so what? 3 minutes. With a novel, we are talking about putting several hours of someone else's time on the line. And so, while it isn't to be approached as gingerly as "Seriously, take this job," a substantial pinch of ginger is in order.

Anyway, I'm thinking of what would be the one novel I would recommend to the world (i.e, you) from my reading this year. Although I am militant about keeping novel reading in my life [see p. 8 6 here], I don't read that many, so maybe I don't even deserve an annual recommendation. I've decided my three finalists are: Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl; The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster; and Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell.

Special Topics in Calamity Physics is basically written for women under 30, at heart if not chronologically, and I felt both age and gender wrong for the book even as I enjoyed it. So, I'm going to offer it here as my recommended book for women, but, regardless of your gender, you can only read it on my recommendation if you promise first that you will not hold me responsible for the sucky "goldfish" speech near the end.*

New York Trilogy are three novellas that add up to few pages than either of my other finalists. It plays heavily on Boy Themes related to accomplishment, obsession, and losing one's way, and has all these recursive turns of paragraph and plot that seem to appeal more to the geek-male reader than anyone else. So it wins as my recommendation to male readers: especially because it's a more risky recommendation, and studies show men are less risk-averse than women, and yet also shorter, and studies show men begrudge a disappointing book recommendation more than women. Seriously, dude, read this.

I suspect some people won't like the idea of separate recommendations for female and male readers, or will at least think of themselves as not someone for whom gender-specific recommendations are pertinent. For such people, I recommend Cloud Atlas. In terms of the most moments of my reading and thinking, "Dear God, this book is a freaking miracle," Cloud Atlas is the clear winner for this year and likely in my all-time top ten. If there is someone out there who is putting together more interesting English-language sentences one-after-another than David Mitchell, I want to know who it is (I mean it, let me know). Cloud Atlas is a big clever puzzle-box of textual wonders, but it's main shortcoming is that it's a book that uses a really smart conceit to show off Mitchell's virtuosity at the expense of any overarching plot. The book is instead a confederacy of six different plots that are not intended to "come together," and while they do add up to more than the sum of their parts, the sum is maybe still not enough or else it would be the year's hands-down winner.

Importantly, none of these novels is as good as The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon, which remains my favorite contemporary novel. If you haven't read it, seriously, read that. If you've read it and didn't really like it, I don't know why you'd pay any attention to any of my recommendations above.

I'd love to know any recommendation from your own reading that you have for me. Note the singular noun, though: one year -> one novel that's worth a try just because you say so. Beyond that I have to be persuaded.

* The only more dramatic lapse of form I've read in the past few years is the second-to-last page of the The Boy Detective Fails (Joe Meno), which literally made me feel a little stupid for having enjoyed so much of the rest of the book. If you read The Boy Detective Fails, have someone black-out the second-to-last page for you before beginning.

Update: Lucy, who read 120 novels last year, has come out with her top 10 11 list, which includes The Boy Detective Fails and spurns Spec Top Calam Phys, even though her recommendation was why I read it in the first place.

Door Gift

Last week J and I found a box of old Christmas decorations he bought before we'd even met. It was only after putting some of it out on the door to our flat that it occurred how sad it must make Boy #106 and Girl #15 look - home alone clutching the iron gate while the body-less snowman twirled above their heads in the monsoon weather. Perhaps some kid in our block (we discovered later it was the 9 year-old niece of our neighbour upstairs) felt this way too, because last night, she slipped this painting under our door.


company for the home alone kids this new year's eve with Mr Cross-eyed, Lil' Fearful, and Ms Those-Aren't-My-Friends

friends, whoever it is you will be with this evening - you, them, him, her - amps wish you good company.

Singles for sale...

Hi
As I have picked up quite a few spare singles recently, I'm putting some of them up on ebay over the next few days: If you click on the title it should take you to the items.
Already up are Bearded Lady, Capt. Groovy, Brother Susan and Killjoys. You can expect stuff by The Boston Boppers, Sisters, Go Go Thunder, Tiger Lily, Marcus Hook Roll Band and others to go up soon.

2006: the year in review

Really, the world moves so much faster nowadays that what used to be a year is really only two months, max.

November 4: Jeremy Freese writes a blog post that makes reference to the Notre Dame sociology department.

November 7: Dan Myers, chair of Notre Dame sociology department, learns of post, comments on it.

November 9: Dan Myers starts "whitecards" online discussion group.

November 14: Dan Myers starts blog.

November 18: Dan Myers follows four fairly staid "public sociology" style posts with post about soft drink cans, and the slippery slope toward Wisconsin School-style blogging is begun.

December 14: Dan Myers writes anniversary post (which, given the speed of the blogosphere, are indeed properly measured in months rather than annums), in which he notes having posted 37 times in his first month.

December 30: Dan Myers admits blogging addiction, posts photos of himself with custom-made bloggerwear.

Goal for 2007: Contribute to setting three more chairs and a provost on the path to blog addiction.

Consistent with it being the end of the year, I've been in a nostalgic mood, although not necessarily for this year per se. One great thing about blogging is that after awhile the posts combine into a kind of record that is sort of like a prose scrapbook (indeed, blogging is a lot more like scrapbooking* than I think myself or many other grown-up academic disdain-for-scrapbooking types would ever care to admit). For example, I was thinking about this post earlier, which now has a certain quaintness to it.

More pertinently, though, I had an exchange with Emily today about this episode before I started my blog, where she had her friend Henry draw a comic for her birthday based on an e-mail I sent her. This, I don't want to lose, so I'm putting it in the scrapbook here (readable size here.**):



* I went out some years ago with a woman who gave me a tour of her scrapbooks on our second date. Suffice it to say there was no third date.

** Sometimes I think I should beg Henry to update the drawing of me that is featured on the top of my sidebar. Other times, I think I should beg him to make a drawing of a rendition of an even younger me than my current sidebar drawing.

Dump –Baby Baby/Annabelle

Dump –Baby Baby/Annabelle –Fontana 6013061 (1975 French issue)

Dump were a Dutch band from Alkmaar. Formed as The Dallics, following several different line up permutations they changed their name to Dallic Control before ending up as Dump releasing this double whammy Glam Cracker! Baby Baby is based on the kiddy song Alouette, (which explains the Pic cover), but adds heavy boot stomping and ends up sounding somewhat like an unreleased Sisters single. Whereas Baby Baby can irritate due to the repetitive main theme, Annabelle is an absolute corker and totally mad to boot…Starting off with what could be a cool 70’s cop show theme, the track goes completely nuts with phasing, zany backing vocals, a great over production which includes just about everything that could be brought into the studio and a very surprising edit (around the 2:10 mark).They definitely pull it off as the extremely catchy chorus keeps everything together, but you’re still left wondering what exactly hit you… Both songs were written and produced by Piet Souer and Hans Van Hemert who were the head honchos behind countless releases at the time including Mouth & McNeal and Cardinal Point. Hans also produced the first Q 65 album, so pretty Gouda pedigree, nee?

PS: Thanks to Jos for the background info.


Click on title to hear edits of Annabelle and Baby Baby

fan of the year!

So, my father has always been a huge high school sports fan.* About a decade ago, after an incident involving my father, the principal of my hometown high school, and my father's middle finger, my father ceased his allegiance to my school, and indeed he later worked to help defeat referendums that sought to raise additional tax revenue for it.

Then he started following sports for the consolidated school of the towns to the north and west. Now that he is retired, he goes to home and away games for both boys' and girls' teams. Anyway, all his loyal travelling and attendance has been this year rewarded, as my father was recently selected "Fan of the Year" by this school:




Apparently one of the things this school does at the halftimes of its basketball games is have this contest where you pay $1 and get to attempt a halfcourt shot, and after halftime is over half the pot is divided among whoever made theirs. My father has won this contest several times, although because his hands are arthritic he's had to get approval to be able to wear these special gloves that help him grip the ball:



During football games, the cheerleaders from this school do jumping jacks every time the team scores -- one jumping jack for each point of the total score at the time, so they do more jumping jacks as the game goes on. My father, to "help motivate the team," does the same thing from some place off the sidelines, only he does a sit-up per point instead of a jumping jack. My father is 72 years old. For a game in which the team scored over forty points, this amounted to over 150 sit-ups over the course of the evening. I could maybe do 150 sit-ups, over the course of a month.

My father believes he can affect the outcome of high school sporting events using the power of prayer. However, he only uses this power when a team that truly deserves to win would lose if not for his/His intervention. He has a story about a time when this school was losing as a result of poor refereeing but then won on a last-second desperation heave by an unlikely player who was falling out of bounds as he shot. I mean, it's a fine enough basketball story in itself, but when my father tells it, the last two minutes of his play-by-play are interspersed with his supplications to God to allow true hoops justice to prevail. However dubious I may be of the idea of a supreme being who meddles with high school sports, the spiritual asides do make the story much more intimate and compelling, and if anything I've come to be disappointed by his accounts of other games where it's only about the players and not also his calling God for aid.

* We will not here discuss on this happy blog the implications of my father being such a huge high school sports fan and having a son so devoid of athletic aptitude. To his great credit, knowing other families with dads who are really into sports, my lot could have been far worse.

More than bricks and mortar

I've never before been near or inside a building designed by Pritzker Prize winner Frank Gehry. Since the Sentosa "Integrated Resort" ultimately did not go to Kerzner & Capitaland with their Gehry bid, the chances for that now are even more remote.

Of course, Gehry's recent freeform and curvaceously faceted buildings, such as the Guggenheim Museum at Bilbao and the Disney Concert Hall in LA, have attracted a good amount of love and hate. In the same way, one of us islanders had described his design for the Sentosa IR as "a wad of wet tissue", while another, a "lantern" (I reckon it looks like a lion fish - which, if true, is a great literal dig at the Merlion!). Well, at least it was a design that stirred some imagination and inspired opinion. Give me architectural tissue or lantern anytime instead of Universal Studios...

What led me to think about Gehry was a random link to this Interview with Gehry in the Opinion Journal. Even if you don't know who Frank Gehry is, it's an interesting read for what it says about a man - and death. Or rather, what facing death may say about a man.

The interview cites his famed ignorance of computers, his reliance on teams of engineers and architects and this:

Then apropos of very little in particular, he says, "What I am interested in is, since it's 150 people here and a lot of people's lives and futures depend on it, how do you create a succession?" Again Mr. Gehry sounds passionate. "There's a way to leave it and pull the plug and I am fine and they"-referring to his employees-"lose." As part of managing for his own death, Mr. Gehry has been trying to build the public personae of the people who work for him, trying to direct some of the limelight that seems always oriented towards him in their direction. In the catalogs and exhibits devoted to his work, he makes sure to mention the people who worked with him on his various projects.

The interviewer calls this Gehry's "old fashioned virtue".

Some nights ago as J and I walked out of the cinema after watching Curse of the Golden Flower, the conversation wandered from the emperor's "necessary" tyranny to how things should be IF J, one day, have employees.

Our conclusion was that the "old-fashioned virtue" of Gehry's is something that must be pursued. Of course, Gehry's approach can be understood as anachronistic because succession is seldom an issue today. The mark of success is being able to sell off your company for a huge profit as soon as possible. Quick and easy. And it is both "old-fashioned" and a virtue because the workplace tells you that aggressive self-marketing is what keeps you successful, not letting others - much less your employees - steal your limelight. So in contrast to all this, while Gehry may have a parent's obstinate insistence on knowing what's good for you, he seems a good man for having a parent's wise, loving generosity.


image by J

And as usual, J has a more succinct way of putting all this: (taken from his flickr)visited a client today. an italian. he told me that he wants to help other succeed. Hence, he always beileve in giving his employees, those who show potential, opportunities to learn his culinary skills. and even to give his employees reasonably good (by local standards) renumeration packages. Local bosses, learn, learn. This should not be a world where you pay $1 to someone, and you intend to squeeze $1.20 from them. This should be a world when someone ask for $1, give them $1.20. They will give you $2 back. pay-it-forward, so they have beautifully coined this act of generosity. :)

counterfactual thursday

Sure, as far as titles go, "Leader of the Free World" is more important in the abstract than "Godfather of Soul." Still, if a shadowy figure stepped into the wayback machine and contemplated the following options:

red button: Going back to 1913 and preventing Gerald Ford from being born, or

blue button: Going back to 1933 and preventing James Brown from being born.

Does anyone really doubt the world would be more different from what it is now if the shadowy figure pressed the blue button vs. the red button?

Plus, it seems also more straightforward that the ways the world would be different would be for the worse had James Brown never been born than if Gerald Ford never been born. Artists have this advantage. With an elected official, you can point to how they did A and B and C, but they also kept someone from holding that same office who would have done D and E and F. I think it's very likely we would have had the Nixon pardon and "Whip Inflation Now!" even if Ford had never been born, while I think it's very unlikely we would have had "Get Up (I Feel Like Being Like a) Sex Machine" had James Brown never been born.

That said, I do have these married friends that had an unusual number of aspects of their courtship involve Gerald Ford--e.g., a pivotal date being a trip to the Gerald R. Ford presidential museum--so much so that they sent him an invitation to their wedding. He did not respond. Their love endured the snub.

Meanwhile: That John Edwards is running is the only reason I have not provided an early JFW endorsement of Barack Obama for the 2008 presidential race. Likewise, the seemingly likely Obama candidacy is the only reason Edwards's announcement was not accompanied by his getting the official JFW endorsement today.

jeremy freese: the footnotes interview, final part

[in response to questions e-mailed by a writing doing a piece for sociology's newsletter, Footnotes; links to parts 1, 2, and 3]

Question #4: Do your students read your blog?

I think this question is most interesting with respect to the question of whether one's undergraduate students read one's blog and, if so, how this influences content. Graduate students do not influence content of my blog any more than the general knowledge that anyone out there could be reading my blog, but I might imagine approaching my blog a little differently (as in more self-consciously) if I was teaching a class of first-year undergraduates at the same time. I have not had that experience yet with my blog.

Question #5: How do you decide what topics to blog on and do you believe they go beyond the scope of sociology?

My blog posts mostly happen by me happening to be at the computer when I think of something I think would make a good blog post, and then I write it. Most of my blog posts are resolutely not works of sociology or about sociology. I did not start my blog as an act of "public sociology," and, even if I did, I generally regard as objects of disdain and intellectual suspicion those in sociology who fret overmuch about whether they are talking about things in a consistently "sociological" fashion. In any case, I view my blog as more an outlet from my non-sociology and meta-sociology thoughts. I think if I had started my blog with the idea of it being something where instead I would write only about my take as a sociologist on issues of the day or whatever, I would have written about five posts before getting bored with it and giving up.

Incidentally, if anyone does answer this question by saying they have an exclusively sociological blog and it's a blog they have managed to keep up for, say, more than a fifty posts, I want to know who they are. To my knowledge, no true "sociology" blog, in the narrow and tedious sense presupposed by the question, exists. All the better for sociology, I say.

(ongoing series) ways i am different from my family

872. My lack of enthusiasm for milk.



Photo from Xmas dinner at my sister's. Which place at the table was mine will be left as an exercise for the lactose-lovin' reader.

873. My lack of enthusiasm for scatological humor.*



Above is the stocking stuffer given to myself and others by two different immediate family members this holiday. In case it's not clear from the photo, the idea with "The Super Dooper Reindeer Pooper" is that it's a plastic reindeer that you press on its tail and it defecates brown jellybeans. Seriously, there is basically a two-step surefire recipe if you want to make my family double-over with laughter and me squirm uncomfortably: (1) take a joke that would otherwise be maybe funny, maybe not and (2) add poop.

* As always when I use a book for the background of a photo, a coveted JFW virtual kewpie doll will be awarded to the first person to identify it.

blessed

Friends, amps wish you a blessed Christmas - albeit belatedly - and give you this drawing by J/TOHA in his inimitable freestyle, about insatiable appetites and the real blessing that we may therefore miss.


click for flickr view

And in keeping with this theme, our favourite presents this year include a small container of "A Hot Hot Rub for Aches & Pains" from cousin KM that promises to also "Conquer All Demons" (!) and a faux gold plaque from an aunt that declares for us "Christ is the Head of this Home".

xmas dispatch from the freese family farm

(me, out back)

I am sitting here on Xmas morning watching Live With Regis and Whatever Her Name Is. I am doing this because I believe that, as a reminder of the true reason for the season, I should start of Xmas morning with a glimpse of what hell might be like. (Kidding. While my personal spiritual beliefs are not a matter for discussion on this blog, I will say that if I did believe there was a hell that featured morning television playing in an eternal loop for the damned, it would not be this show but rather The View.)

The trip back to the farm has been fun. I spent some time yesterday scouting the area from the top of my dad's old sheep trailer:



I spent time with my great niece:



And, because I have learned that keys to psychologically successful trips home are preparation and assertiveness, I made sure I had appropriate dress for playing the role of adjudicator should any disputes of protocol break out as the family was opening presents:



Merry Xmas, all!

jeremy freese: the footnotes interview, part 3

(parts 1 and 2)

Question #3: Talk about about blogging as a sociological phenomenon.

Everyone talks about blogging like the first phenomenon to be explained is why people have blogs. Blogging is people providing material they wish to share with whoever cares to read it. The Internet makes it possible for anyone to enter an attention market for very low cost. Attention markets have always had a lot of entrants -- many people, it seems, really like attention -- and so it's not surprising many people would start blogs. Attention markets can be brutal and cold to the casual entrant, and so it's not that surprising many people who start blogs would stop not long afterward.

If there is a sociological puzzle about blogs, it's why people read blogs, not why they write them. If blogging collapses and later comes to be seen as a "fad," it will be caused more by some steep decline in blog-reading, not a collapse of interest in blog-writing. There are many different types of blog readers, and I would love it if the sociology of the blog reader was understood better than it presently is. But: A major cause of blog-reading, as far as I can tell, is the rise of occupational circumstances that give people large amount of unstructured reading time in front of a computer. Here people are looking for very short diversions, not to watch whole television programs before they get back to work. Blogs provide a nice, brief, regular connection with another person, where that author may have something entertaining or emotional or edifying to offer you.

As for larger sociological implications, before blogs the agenda for what news stories were important and how they were interpreted was concentrated in the hands of a frighteningly small number of people given prevailing delusions about our being a participatory democracy. Blogs have helped open that up. From a System of Professions perspective, blogs are encroaching into the jurisdiction of journalists, and journalists have shown both a fascination and fear of blogs. Both reactions are deserved.

Bilbo Baggins –Back Home -Video!

Although they had a awful name and sported the dodgiest flares, Bilbo Baggins still released some fine singles. Back Home is not quite as good as Saturday Night, but I hope you will enjoy the clip.

Normal service will resume around the 28th of December, in the meantime enjoy the mince pies or whatever cooks your goose…

Click on title for the video of Back Home

jeremy freese: the footnotes interview, part 2

(part 1 here)

Question #2: What are your views on the controversy surrounding academics who blog (ie, hiring committees that look askance at it, perceptions that blogging is taking time away from "legitimate" scholarship, etc)?

The issues surrounding hiring committees using information from blogs in their evaluation of a candidate are more complicated than what I have time to answer.

But: I think hiring committees are short-sighted if they take the existence of a blog per se as a strike against a candidate. Given two candidates who seemed otherwise equal but one had a blog and one didn't, I would go with the person with a blog. I think having a blog and reading blogs is a good indicator of being intellectually alive and wanting to remain so. The latter is especially important in sociology, as there are so many promising sociologists whose curiosity is dead by the time they are five years out of graduate school. Blogging is also a good indicator of being able to write and being eager to share ideas, which are attributes sociology departments should value.

As for blogs taking time away from "legitimate" scholarship, I understand that there are sociologists who have monomaniacal devotion to their craft to the exclusion of all else. However: many sociologists pursue hobbies, watch television, practice religion, engage in extensive personal grooming rituals, or have kids they refuse to neglect. I have little patience for anyone who does any of these things and thinks me derelict for the time I spend blogging. I have much enthusiasm for my work and spend much time at it, but I am not going to forgo all other things I enjoy for the sake of sociology.

Propeller –Apache Woman

Propeller –Apache Woman/ Devil’s Symphony –Philips 6003145 (1971 Germany)

Propeller were formed by original Rattles members Achim Reichel and Herbert Hilderbrandt and they released this fine single along with a self titled album in ‘71. Apache Woman is pretty raw, earthy and great fun. The lyrics are probably due to them watching too many Winnetou movies (Lex Barker!) with Apache Womenfolk dancing to the Union????, but the brutal stomping is most engaging. Devil’s Symphony is really wild as well with pounding piano in a Sonics kind of way…

Click on title for soundclip

xmas hotel foxtrot

I just received a handsomely formatted Xmas e-mail sent out by a guy from high school. Back when he was an eighth grader or so, I remember he and three other guys formed this heavy metal band together, and they even rented the VFW hall a couple times for performances. They wrote this one song that started off with "I lost the battle / I lost the fight / I choked before I / Took the first bite." It was called "It's Too Late," but then they decided they shouldn't do such downer metal lest parents or guidance counselors intervene, so they kept everything the same but changed the refrain to "It's Not Too Late." Fame and groupies did not follow.

Anyway, apparently he's still kept his connection to the music business in various ways, although he's no longer into heavy metal. Indeed, he and his wife have just had a baby. The boy's middle name is Lennon. His first name is Wilco.

A time to live and a time to -

image by J

Y: Hey, do you notice that there's always more funerals and wakes held in the void deck in December? More people die in December yah?
J: Oh yah.
Y: I wonder why...maybe it does actually get colder in December and old folks are weaker so they will fall sick and get pneumonia?
J: Yah, that makes sense.
Y: Or maybe it is psychological...you know, December is a time for reflection, and old people, they look back on another year that has passed and that the new year is approaching, maybe they grow tired or think that it is time to go -

On our small tropical island, sometimes it feels like nature does not offer many reminders of the rhythmns and seasons of time and life. The trees shed their leaves all year round, it rains or drizzles without seeming pattern, humidity is a heavy monotony to bear, and the weathergirl never quite tires of reading the temperature range of 26 to 33 degree celsius (someone in the office once joked that we do have seasons - aircon and outdoors). But in the last few days I am reminded how the coming and going of the monsoons, however less dramatic than their Indian manifestations, however unexceptional, do mark our small island's years.

In one of my favourite Hou Hsiao Hsien films A time to live and a time to die, the audience views from a distance (literally, given the number of long shots) the life of a 50s taiwanese family nearly transplated from and the barely perceptible rhythmns of their life. We do not know how many years have passed in the film, except that the children very slowly but surely have grown taller.

I remember in the last scene of the film, we see the narrator's grandmother lying on the tatami floor by the porch, seemingly taking an afternoon nap on a hot and humid summer day. And in that oppressive stillness, the narrator slowly comes to realise from a trail of ants by his grandmother's silent body that she has passed away.

jeremy freese: the footnotes interview, part 1

I received an e-mail from someone who is writing a story on sociologists who blog for Footnotes, the official newsletter of the American Sociological Association. I told him I would do the interview over e-mail and he sent me five questions. I've decided I am going to answer them here, in addition to replying to his e-mail.

Question #1: Why did you start a blog and do you feel it contributes to a wide audience?

I've had people ask "Why did you start a blog?" and "Why do you have a blog?" as if the two questions are interchangeable. Most people who start blogs stop shortly thereafter. I think the question of "Why do you have a blog?" is really two questions: "Why did you start?," and "Why do you continue?"

I started my blog on a whim because it was summer, I was working hard but also a little bored, and it looked fun. The only blog I had ever seen was Kieran Healy's, and since he called his Kieran Healy's Weblog, it never occurred to me to call mine anything other than Jeremy Freese's Weblog.

I figured when I started my blog that I would probably do it for two weeks, get bored and stop. That was three and a half years ago.

The main reasons I keep blogging are that it allows me to introduce a different kind of creativity into my day, and it provides a different way of feeling connected to other people. Blogging has been good for me in a number of other ways, including leading me to embark on some fun adventures that were justified solely by the thought they would make for a good post later.

Do I feel like my blog contributes to a wide audience? Strange question. Reading blogs is a sedentary activity, and so the time people spend reading my blog is time they could be spending exercising. Still, I would think that even those readers of my blog who are relatively "wide" would not blame my blog for it. Indeed, when I went on a diet and tracked my progress on my blog, several other people joined the same diet and also lost weight. For this reason, I would say that if anything my blog has played a positive role in the ongoing War on Obesity.

If the question instead refers to the number of readers, I have no idea how many people read my blog. I do know that more people at the sociology meetings recognize me for having a blog than recognize me for anything scholarly I have done so far. Obviously, I have very mixed feelings about this.

As for whether I contribute anything to the people who read my blog, I view blogs as much more ruthless than the academic world, which has many forums that allow people to contribute by expressing their thoughts to essentially captive or otherwise coerced audiences. With blogs, if you aren't giving people anything in your posts, they won't keep reading. That said, exactly what I'm contributing to those people who check in on my blog from time to time remains mysterious.

strange mishap, or sociology job market saboteur!

I'm still in Madison, about to embark on an evening of egregious violation of established wisdom about designing social surveys. Ah, the damage deadlines do to science, especially in combination with competing obligations and indefatigable procrastination.

Anyway, the secretary for my program at Harvard sent me the following e-mail today:

Jeremy, the U.S. Postal Service returned a recommendation letter for  
[name] to [university] today. The letter was torn in half and the  
return address was showing. It came in a plastic bag. I'll leave it in  
your mailbox, but wanted you to know the receipient didn't receive it, 
in case there is a deadline.

Indeed, there was a deadline. This is regarding a letter I sent over a month ago. Clearly, someone with some serious postal connections is trying to thwart the power of my prose.

Peter D. Kelly –Rock To The Jukebox

Peter D. Kelly –Rock To The Jukebox//Brotherhood Within –DJM DJS.333 (1974 UK)

Loud Crunching Glam Stomper alert! Rock To The Jukebox may be formulaic, but it is great fun with its loud chopping guitars, handclaps and gang show backing vocals: ROCK!!!! The B side is truly horrible, so it would be appreciated if anyone knows if it’s worth seeking out his other singles –Hot Digitty Dog and Hard Road (Is this the Vanda &Young number?)

Click below for for soundclip

Gwen Stefani “The Sweet Escape”. Download FREE mp3 Album!

Here is the new Album of Gwen Stefani ”The Sweet Escape”.
Release date Dec-04-2006.

TrackList:
01. Wind It Up
02. The Sweet Escape
03. Orange County Girl
04. Early Winter
05. Now That You Got It
06. 4 In The Morning
07. Yummy
08. Fluorescent
09. Breakin’ Up
10. Don’t Get It Twisted
11. U Started It
12. Wonderful Life
13. Wind It Up (Live Version)

Download Gwen Stefani "The Sweet Escape"

odd man out

(Evite list for 'A Family New Year's Party')

A friend of mine got married shortly after college, and they have had a tradition of having a New Years' Eve party ever since. I've lived elsewhere and have only been able to attend once, although he's kept me on the invite list every year. Reports of the party from the early years suggested that it was at least a slightly rowdy affair. Over time, and with the birth of two children, the name of the party has changed from something like "C. & J.'s New Years' Eve SuperMegaUltraBoozerBash!!!" to now being called "A Family New Year's Party." As you can see from the guest list above, one of the entries is not like the others. Ah, aging. Ah, the failure to make normative life course transitions.

how my psyche is like a snowflake

Quoth an e-mail received just now:

I was talking to [name] about how you seemed really distracted yesterday. He said, "I've never seen that guy in the same mood twice!"

Meanwhile, extremely busy here in Madison, so I am not sure how much blogging the world will get from me.

In the Kurt Vonnegut story "Harrison Bergeron," the protagonist is a genius who, due to certain statutory mandates for equality, is required to wear a device that lowers his intelligence to normal levels. The way this is accomplished is simply that the device emits a incredibly loud noise in his ears every fifteen seconds, preventing him from working up any cognitive momentum. I have come to think maybe this is part of my problem with meetings when there are more than three people and no clear agenda. You'll get like three turns of talk from different participants that seem like they are on the topic you are trying to resolve, and then the fourth just seems to completely derail the momentum toward action onto something else (although, of course, to that person what they are saying may be completely on topic, and it's your own turn that may seem to provide the Bergeron beep.)

Downhill Racers –Lovin’ Pots

Downhill Racers –Lovin’ Pots/Lovely Vanessa –Ariola 17678 AT (1977 German issue)

Lovin’ Pots is a very commercial sounding Teen-Glam-Bubblegum number with a wonderfully bright and loud production. It all makes sense when you realise that the J. Lange who wrote and produced the A side is none other that Robert “Mutt” Lange. My guess is that this is a pure studio creation and the group probably didn’t exist. The B side sounds totally unrelated as it’s a delightful Psych/Pop number with more than a hint of Friends or Sunflower era Beach Boys. Written and probably sung by Pete Dello (Ex-Honeybus of I Can’t Let Maggie Go fame), Lovely Vanessa could have easily fitted on the Pete Dello and Friends album.

Click on title for soundclip

Xmas Competition –Mystery Track!

As I’m feeling a tad seasonal, I am giving away a free single! All you have to do is enter this simple competition..

The first person to name the artist who performs this mystery track, will win one of the singles below.

Choose from:
1) Catapult –Teeny Bopper Band –Pic Sleeve (VG/VG)
2) Bonnie St.Claire –Clap Your Hands and Stamp Your Feet –Pic Sleeve (VG+/ EX)
3) The Barracudas –I Want My Woody Back (2003 Munster reissue) (Mint)
4) Blackfoot Sue –Sing Don’t Speak (VG+)
5) Geordie –Can You Do It (EX)

The artist in question is well known and this perfect Power Pop/Glam track has been a long time personal fave, so it’s a good excuse to upload the full song.

All you have to do is post a comment with your answer along with your choice of single before 2 PM (UK) on Tuesday 19th December. I will then publish all the answers and declare a winner. The winner can then contact me via email (on the profile page) with their address details. I will then post the single on Wednesday.

Good luck!

Click on title to hear the mystery track

Sting –Thief Of Baghdad

Sting –Thief Of Baghdad/Stay, Goodbye –EMI C006-95604 (1974 German issue)

Thief Of Baghdad has an imaginative Red Bus production from Roberto Danova (who also had some involvement with Mungo Jerry and Geordie). Opening with a silly opening chant (bubble bubble bubble bah???) the song then shifts into Polka Glam mode until it breaks into a West Coast Sunshine Pop massed choir. There’s a lot crammed into the 2:58 and the result is rather splendid. The songs are written by Howman/Dare who also wrote and produced the last Wishful Thinking single in the 80’s. Apart from that, who knows…

Click on title for sounclip

2-in-1 saturdays

click pic for larger view in flickr. J/TOHA coloured this drawing as well. For his version, click here

It's always hard drawing kids on the train since they can't ever keep still. Even when they do, they are always quicker to notice you. And unlike adults, who will pretend that they are not aware of you (or that anyone would even think of sketching them), kids have no qualms about making their knowledge obvious and staring back. But this girl was sitting quiet in the pram. She looked way too old to be still pushed about in the pram. She stared vacantly ahead and did not fidget. Occasionally her eyes would move, but not her head which was supported by a child-sized pillow.

After a good afternoon of kueh pie tee and wine with colleagues at my boss's apartment, J and I spent the rest of the day with Ma J at the hospital. These 2 halves of the day could not have been more different.

By 9 or so, most of the visitors to the hospital had left. Some patients had turned off the lights by their beds and were asleep. Others, like Ma J, kept their eyes open - even if only the narrowest - perhaps afraid to be left alone once they gave any indication of sleep.

Right beside Ma J's bed was a wall of windows. The view from the 9th floor this side of the hospital was completely un-blocked - there was not any highrise buildings. There was the hospital driveway, a field, some old barracks or houses (now an old folks home) and clean stacks of private apartments in the middle distance and beyond. Traffic was sparse and considerate on the quiet side roads. And this being a Saturday night, not many windows on the apartment blocks were lit. Those that were gave out a warm orangey glow, the kind of light you imagined people would slowly dance to or doze off in as music played.

As I stood by these windows looking out, a constant December breeze on the skin and the very last of the wine leaving my head, there was a calm and a comfort. Perhaps like me, you would say that the view was peaceful. But if you were a patient lying beside these windows looking out - maybe a bedridden patient like Ma J - I wonder if this view was not one of the loneliest, the December wind through the hospital's woven blanket a cold companion.

an open letter to anyone who happens to find themselves someday running a sociology department

Sociology departments will often bring in multiple candidates for a single junior position, and decide that more than one candidate is suitable. Say Candidate A is the department's first choice, and Candidate B the second. A common strategy has been to call Candidate A and make her the offer, and not say anything to Candidate B until Candidate A has made up her mind. One justification is that if the turnaround time for a negative decision by A is relatively brief, B can then be given the offer under the impression that he was really the first choice and the committee just took its time deliberating. I'm not sure this was ever a great strategy from anyone's standpoint, but it really does not make sense in the age of the sociology job market wiki. Junior candidates who take the time to give a talk at your university and get all excited at the possibility of a future there shouldn't have to find out someone else has the offer from a wiki. That's just cold*, and sociology is supposed to pride itself on being nicer than certain neighboring disciplines.

* Given the common (but dispreferred!) pronunciation of my last name as rhyming with "knees" instead of "niece," nicknames given to the blog proprietor in graduate school by The Other Guys included "Frosty" and "2-Kold." These, certainly, were superior to nicknames from junior high or high school, which for obvious reasons of pride and propriety will not be shared here.

Addendum: Given that there are now several people actually in charge of sociology departments who are known members of the sociology blog universe, I suppose I should state explicitly to those prone to seeing subtext in blissfully subtextless posts that this not directed at any known blog author or blog reader. I have, though, heard more than one story of bad-news-delivery-via-wiki this year, which I think is fine at the stage of people finding out they didn't get a (first-round) interview but not at the stage of finding out they didn't get an (first-round) offer.

Cobraa –Ride A Pony

Cobraa –Ride A Pony/The End Of The Day –EMI C006-30443 (1973 Germany)

Ride A Pony is a fun piece of nonsensical Space Rock Glam. Not sure what they were on about with their talk of riding sunbeams and ponies in space and time especially when I’m sure the band had their own Teutonic stallion with hosen schlange zu heimat! Anyhow it’s ends up sounding like a collision between Ride A White Swan and flipped out Bubblegum Krautrock with a cool fuzzed out lead break. Noch einmal und alle zusamen –ride a pony baby…

Click on title for soundclip

my contribution to eszterfeszt

Today is Eszter's birthday. She put out her gift request awhile back:

I’m well aware of the comment “There comes a time when you should stop expecting other people to make a big deal about your birthday. That time is age eleven.” Nonetheless, if you care to contribute to my upcoming celebrations, I’m collecting photos of the number 3 from around the world. So email me one if you can (or better yet, post one on Flickr and send me the link). (Yes, I know I can find tons of 3s on Flickr, but these would be from you to me.:)

Okay, Eszter, this one is from me to you. My apartment is number 3, so that's easy enough to consider personalized. And we both have ThinkPads, so I can work that in. And you love Flickr, so I can pull up a photo of the two of us from your Flickr page. And, hey, maybe I can balance it just so there will be three fingers showing in the photo. Happy birthday!

latest assault in my ongoing war on paper

(asterisks old, checked boxes renewed)

I just renewed my membership in the American Sociological Association. I cut my number of journal subscriptions from five to two (American Sociological Review and, proud to say it, Contexts), which is the minimum needed to have immediate online access to the rest. Subscriptions to academic journals aren't cheap, but I'm fortunate presently to have a research account that I can use pay for my journal subscriptions. The bigger problem: I don't want them! I want the shelf space, and freedom from the weird mental obligation of maintaining a complete run of some journal on my shelf even though, when I do want to read an old article in a journal I own, I usually still just look it up online so I can print out an 8x11 copy and put it the appropriate project binder once I've marked it up. Indeed, most of my journals are back in Madison and I haven't missed them at all.

BTW, when I was in graduate school I snapped up a nearly complete 30+ year run of ASRs from a retiring professor. A few months later I thought: What the hell is the point of having these? and sent out an e-mail to the soc grad student listserv asking if anyone wanted them. Of course I got several immediate replies. The guy who took them who had spent several years in the past living under a false identity while wanted by the law under his real identity, and he was doing his dissertation on "false identity" by interviewing various folks who knew him back when he was someone else. Sociology. I don't know what happened to him.

Kasenetz – Katz In The 70’s: Ohio Ltd and Canyon

Ohio Ltd –Wham Bam/ Same –Buddah BOA 386 (1973 US Promo)

4 years after the amazing Captain Groovy And His Bubblegum army single, Kasenetz – Katz used the re-branded Ohio Express franchise to release this superb piece of Hard Glam/Boogie with its Get It On cop. The hooks and overall Bubblegum catchiness remain, but a much harder edge is added making this a real lost classic perfectly in sync with the best JSG singles released around that time.

Canyon –Top Of The World/Boogie Down Broadway –London HLZ 10500 (1975 UK issue)

The production duo then put their clout behind the unique single by Canyon. The approach is similar to Ohio Ltd, but it is now ’75 and we are moving closer to Ram Jam (Black Betty) territory with this fine hard rockin’ number. Not sure of the line-ups on these two singles or if they share any of the same crew, the songwriting credits give no indication of this one way or the other

Click on title for edits of Wham Bam and Top Of The World

truest thing i'll type all day

In an e-mail, just now:

Starting a blog has easily been the single greatest generator of unanticipated consequences of anything I have ever done in my life.

You?

Meanwhile, as for the question of truest things, I was recently trying to think of what I thought was the truest thing ten words or less in the recent history of popular music. The reason I was thinking of this was a candidate sprung to mind, the line "How you gonna win if you ain't right within?" from Lauryn Hill. The candidacy of this statement has two problems, though--one being that maybe it is profound but still not quite profound enough, the other being I don't really think it's actually true, as certain ways of being "not right within" seem to be quite consonant with winning, i.e., monomanical tenacity (to bob for a couple examples, take Bobby Fischer and Bobby Knight). Let me know if you have any nominations.

the cosmopolitan vs the homebody

image by J

J/TOHA writes: One of my japanese class lecturers used to call me "cosmopolitan". Frankly, I don't know why. That was a huge word for me! Anyway, I have been reading a bit about design and the world of creatives. And it seems that one of the most commonly quoted source of inspiration for these folks is travelling. As I have an extremely sensitive nose, I cannot endure long flights, since my nose would be all clogged up and my throat will become extremely dry. So the furthest I have ever been to is Japan. But I have been thinking about travelling quite a lot these days. Maybe because it is the end of the year. Or maybe the cosmopolitan in me is calling.

There are many types of travellers. Some feel the need to see every significant historic and cultural site, taste every possible local dish. The supermarket traveller. Some like the thrill of adventure and seek out only the most exotic and the most obscure. The trophy traveller. Others desire the luxury afforded only to the foreigner: the ancient massage technique, the flowered bath, the doorman's bow, the Louis Vuitton suitcases. The sahib traveller.

All are not, by dictionary.com's definition, truly cosmopolitan. Perhaps the real cosmopolitan is the business traveller - he is at home anywhere in the world, because he is most often everywhere but home.


image by J

When J and I travel, aiyah, we are most unadventurous! We do the very things we would in Singapore. We take the public transport in order to walk aimlessly around a certain district or to look for connections with what we already know - a film we have watched, a book we have read, a song we have heard or a reference found in any of these. So we end up in sometimes rather unexciting places. A quiet neighbourhood with housewives. A street where the only activity observable are art students taking a break on the college steps. An expired park with dry fountains. Then at the end of the day we stake out a cafe and sit for hours. If we are lucky, we strike up a conversation with someone. If not, we doodle or chat. We then usually return to the cafe or the same street everyday - as if eager to sink roots.

Us amps are definitely not cosmopolitans; we are homebodies! And perhaps we travel hoping to find in a foreign place an even stronger sense of home. Friends, what kind of traveller are you?

an engine, not a camera. and not just any old engine, either.

Okay, so I was touting Donald MacKenzie's An Engine, Not a Camera, even before orgtheory.com announced its symposium on it. Yesterday Kieran put up a post of journal-article quality and length about the book. Reading that caused me to write my own post. Not a response to Kieran's--especially since I haven't finished reading it--but some of my own thoughts on the relationship between economic theory and the world-at-large by way of an extended analogy. The issue is one I've been trying to think through even before reading MacKenzie, but has certainly been influenced by it. Since it's a longish post of limited interest to people who read my blog to see if I've written about bacon night, conversations about raw butter, or short short fiction about dead babies, I've used the Magic Weblog Wayback Machine to post it here instead. The post does include a rousing conclusion about what I currently regard as the inexorable direction our world has been and will continue to be headed.

Two brief updates after further reading: (1) I finished reading Kieran's post and his discussion of "game-changing tricks" is pretty intimately related to (and far more eloquently stated than) how I mean to be thinking of that part of what "performativity" is about. My broader thinking is something like stapling the idea of "game-changing tricks" to the Boyd and Richerson concept of "work-arounds" and having "performativity" emerge as the rabbit out of a much grander hat than just financial markets; (2) I also re-read my dead babies story linked above and it made me wish I had re-enrolled in short short fiction. That class was so much fun.

when i'm out wandering upon the hills of iowa, i am, in fact, thinking of you

Okay, so my understanding from other blogs is that I can do this as long as (1) the link is only up for a temporary period of time, (2) it is plain I am putting it up noting that it is part of an album that I strongly recommend that you own and mean to be promoting here, and (3) I reiterate that I will immediately remove it upon objection from the copyright holder or any other interested party.

In that spirit, here is an ephemeralink to Dar Williams's "Iowa", the song I believe should be adopted as the official song of my home state.* If you haven't heard it, it's worth a listen. If you don't own any Dar Williams albums, I would recommend Out There Live, which features a live version of "Iowa," over any of her studio albums. Indeed, I am convinced that Dar Williams's fame has been hindered by strange studio production decisions that make the live versions of many of her songs better than the versions she had many takes to work on with professional mixers and producers and such. (Case in point: "As Cool As I Am," a beautiful and catchy song that somehow got horribly polluted by horns in the studio.)

* Whatever the likelihood of my ever actually living there again, my home state will always be Iowa.

J. Bastos -Loop Di Love VIDEO!

OK, before you all go thinking I've lost the plot, please take the time to watch this video. I truly believe that this is one the best Pop promos ever. Go with the flow and enjoy the show...

Click on title to watch the video

who's more tired - mama or her cat?

After a Saturday playing cleaning lady for J's ampulets studio while he played IT technician trying to overcome some ridiculous Mac/Intel/Adobe bug, we visited the mentally and physically exhausted Ma J at the hospital before rushing to catch Theatre Practice's re-staging of the late Kuo Pao Kun's play Mama Looking for her Cat.

Mama Looking for Her Cat was first staged in 1988. It is often referred to as the first multilingual play in Singapore. From watching a short clip of that original staging screened as part of Saturday's new staging, how I wished I was in the 1988 audience!

In the 1988 staging, Sasitharan (current director at the Theatre Training and Research Programme ), played an old Indian man Mama bumped into while searching for her cat. It turns out both of them are in a similar predicament, having had their cats "chased out" by their children. Though not speaking each other's language, they gestured and "meowed" their way into an understanding. In the bare black box setting, their physical distance across the length of the stage gradually was closed (on all fours, they moved) until Mama laid an understanding hand on the old man's shoulder - resolving a very well-acted comic exchange.

Kuo Pao Kun was attuned to the fractures of Singapore culture and history. These are breaks and disjunctures the island's people and leaders have intended or had to contend with. There are the cultural break-ups with the languages, traditions and heritage of each migrant community. These accentuate generational breaks, familial tensions. There is also the fractured relationship between people and authority, as well as the break between the island's post-65 history and everything else before. In Mama/Cat, the physical absence of a cat, Mama's loneliness, the children's busy-ness, the multiple languages and the use of nursery rhymes/games - through both extremes of absence and profusion - dramatise the fractures between generations and cultures. Yet those same strategies of rhymes/games and multilingualism offer the possibility of reconciliation.

In this way Kuo Pao Kun was larger than this small island.

Watching last Saturday's staging adapted by Singaporean cast and Austrian director Martina Winkel, there were moments of simple brilliance. The multiple languages and multiple media, when simply used, worked. The simulcast with Austria, including a moving telling of a migrant Turkish family's experience of dislocation in Austria, sounded on paper a tad fussy. But it added to the performance brief stretches of emotional and narrative simplicity and silence (ah, paradox) amidst the theatre studio's noisy dramatics.

And what a noisy 1.5hrs - visually, aurally and "poetically"! The set by artist Brian Gothang Tan (with its suspended screens and multiple TVs showing a live feed of the play), the soundtrack (audience could bring music to be mixed by a DJ), the "guest appearance" by Sasitharan (who sat typing his stream-of-consciousness laments on language and national identity onto the screen) and the actors' performance... noise noise noise.

Perhaps this staging wanted to drive home the point that in 2006, the communication barriers we face are not mitigated but built by the many more channels of information and translation.

Perhaps Sasi wanted, through his palimpsest, to make obvious the analogy between the impatience of Mama's children with our wilful insistence on being cultural orphans - our disregard for the langauge of our national anthem, our national amnesia...etc etc.

Perhaps it was just a long day. So I walked out of the studio a little tired by the noise and lamenting. It was quite opposite to reading Kuo Pao Kun's script and watching that short clip of his 1988 staging where theatre itself - its process and the possibilities of engagement between work/audience/actors - seem to be able to present possibilities, not quite of healing, but at least of learning.

-----------
Some other links on the play here:
> Malaysian arts website Kakiseni
> NLB's Infopedia page
> Ng Yi Sheng's Review at the Flying Inkpot

Madonna - Confessions on a Dance Floor [2005]

ARTIST: Madonna
TITLE: Confessions on a Dance Floor
LABEL: Warner Bros / Wea
GENRE: POP
PLAYTIME: 56:33 min total
RELEASE DATE: 13 Dec 2005

Track List:
01. Hung Up**************5:36
02. Get Together**********5:30
03. Sorry*****************4:43
04. Future Lovers*********4:51
05. I Love New York*******4:11
06. Let It Will Be**********4:18
07. Forbidden Love********4:22
08. Jump*****************3:46
09. How High*************4:40
10. Isaac*****************6:03
11. Push******************3:57
12. Like It Or Not**********4:31



Download MP3 album "Confessions on a Dance Floor"(89.22 MB)
RAR password - "123"

we never mean to bother, but don't think we will ever go to one of your concerts again if you don't do a certain song

(way back, where I come from [set])

"So, are you going to, like, be screaming in-between songs for her to do 'Iowa'?"
"I cannot even begin to tell you how un-Iowan that would be."

Saw Dar Williams tonight. Her opening act was this guy who sounded the way you'd imagine an obese goat sounds as it's being killed. (At least if your imagination is accurate; me, I grew up on a farm, and so don't have to imagine.) He also had these highly autocorrelated lyrics where you imagined him sitting down to write and each time he managed to come up with a new line thinking, "That was tough! How 'bout next I just sing that same line again."

Dar Williams has two songs that are better known than her others. One, "Iowa," I have already offered 50% of all future earnings to a campaign to have it made the official song of my home state. The other, "The Christians and the Pagans," is this hokey-boppy-Kucinichy song regarded with distaste by myself and fellow emotionally discriminating DW fans. When she closed her set having done "The Christians and the Pagans" and not "Iowa," I was clearly Not Happy. Fortunately, she came back and did it as her encore, and all was well.

The lyrics from "Iowa" include "Way back where I come from / We never mean to bother / We don't like to make our passions other people's concerns" and "What is love? / Where did it get me? / Who ever thought of love is no friend of mine." I am convinced that if I could get the bill passed to make it the state song, within five years every rural bar every Saturday night there would be a moment with farmers sitting with their arms around one another, swaying and bellowing these lines.

sometimes the world inside my monitor is such a beautiful and wondrous place that it makes me almost weep

(this! there is nothing in the world I would rather share with you right now more than this!)

Okay, I can't believe no one has called my attention to it before, but linked above is the hands down winner of the coveted JFW award for best music video of 2006. It would win even if not for the fact that the bald singer looks suspiciously like one of my Madison colleagues sporting fake sideburns. I am sitting here in my office on a Saturday night 'cause I've got many things to do, and yet I am mesmerized by this video, especially the thirty or so seconds of choreography starting at 2:20, which I believe must have been divinely inspired.

Speaking of treadmills: I have been going out running here in the cold with my hearty Iowa sweatshirt, ski mask, and kicky Nano exercise mix to keep me warm. Last year's experience leads me to strongly suspect that this is not a feasible all-winter solution, but that the only way I'm going to keep exercising is to pony up the $150 initiation fee plus monthly fee to join the gym near Porter Square. Either that, or get over my fear of working out in proximity to Harvard undergrads.

the little drummer goy

I'm officially ready for the holidays! A friend gave me my very first dreidel!*



First time I met a Jewish person was my first semester of college. He was this short, fat guy that everyone called Sludge-O, who flunked out because he could not get himself out of bed in the morning to go to classes. As I have since discovered, there are many Jews who do just fine in higher education. When I started on the faculty at Madison, I mentioned to a certain Jewish professor friend of mine that I was surprised by the number of my new colleagues who were Jewish. "Jeremy," said this person in a low, let-me-clue-you-in-farmboy voice, "Madison is a top-ranked department."

Anyway, if I kept an annual list of the 100 people I'd interacted with most that year, I'm quite sure the percentage of Jews (or people with, e.g., a Jewish father) on that list has increased more or less every year since starting college. It's not (yet?) a majority, but that I would have to ponder this a moment for a group that is <3% of the US and <1% of the upper Midwest population says something. For me, this has been accompanied by an increasing bystander fascination with certain aspects of Judaism. Coming from my background, I learn about various Jewish practices and regularly think: Wow, Jews really know how to do a religion.

Awhile back, I was going to do a whole post listing maybe a dozen different ways in which I think Judaism has a clearly superior way of doing things (e.g., sitting shiva, and having a holiday where a key part is getting so drunk you can't tell two old men apart), but let's just focus for now on a religion should do the weekend. My chronic problem when I am in situations where I have work for my job to do over the weekend is that I engage in all this guilty procrastination on Saturday and then really only get down to business on Sunday. If I were an adherent to the religious tradition in which I was raised, this would mean that I would feel guilty for procrastinating on Saturday and then feel guilty for working on my Sabbath on Sunday. If I were Jewish, meanwhile, I could justify my procrastination on the grounds that my religion didn't want me working that day anyway, and then Sunday I could get down to work guilt-free.

* As always with photos that have a book in the background, this blog is sponsoring a contest giving a official JFW virtual kewpie doll to first person to identify the book. Readers are reminded of rules of this contest, including those prohibiting the reselling of the doll and prohibiting the author of the book or her/his relatives from entering.

Bonnie St.Claire and Unit Gloria Videos!

Click on the title to go straight to a video of Bonnie and co performing Clap You Hands And Stamp Your Feet surrounded by factory workers with not a single hard helmet in sight. Other videos linked include a live version (80’s??) of the same song, a German version, a great video of Voulez-Vous plus a TV performance of Rocco.
Bonnie St. Claire –what a major major Babe…

Hustler – Money Maker

Hustler –Money Maker/ Boogie Man –A&M 00697511 (1975 Portuguese issue)

I was about to review Buzz’s Itchy Koo Koo, but then thought it was about time to supply some No Nonsense Heads Down Boogie for the weekend …So here you have it!
Hustler were B list Boogie merchants and released a couple of albums at the time. Money Maker is probably their stand out track, but a couple of their other singles Get Out Of Me House and Little People are also pretty good. Nothing is superfluous here and Hustler certainly deliver...As the title of their second album says: Play It Loud!

Click on title for soundclip

somewhere out there, kool & the gang of four are wearing berets and plotting

From CNN.com:

Fiji's military commander, Commodore Frank Bainimarama, announced Tuesday he had taken control of the country from the elected government in the South Pacific nation's fourth coup in two decades.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for democracy, but I can see where a former member of the Commodores ("Brick House", "Three Times a Lady") and Bainimarama ("(I'm Your) Venus", "Cruel Summer") might get a little frustrated by the fall from the spotlight and engage in desperate stunts to regain attention. You can't just expect them to be happy with playing state fairs and bars of dwindling size and trying to work connections to get a gig on The Surreal Life. Besides, what's more retro than a coup? A few more and maybe Behind the Music will move from VH1 to CNN.

George Michael - Twenty Five 2006 (free download 2CD)

ARTIST: George Michael
TITLE: Twenty Five
LABEL: Sony BMG
GENRE: Pop
RELEASE DATE: 2006-11-13


Track List: CD #1/2***************Track List: CD #2/2
01. Everything She Wants**********01. Careless Whisper
02. Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go***02. Last Christmas
03. Freedom***********************03. A Different Corner
04. Faith**************************04. Father Figure
05. Too Funky*********************05. One More Try
06. Fastlove***********************06. Praying For Time
07. Freedom '90********************07. Heal The Pain (With Paul McCartney)
08. Spinning The Wheel*************08. Don't Let The Sun Go Down (Elton John)
09. Outside************************09. Jesus To A Child
10. As (with Mary J. Blige)**********10. Older
11. Freeek!************************11. Round Here
12. Shoot The Dog******************12. You Have Been Loved
13. Amazing***********************13. John And Elvis Are Dead
14. Flawless***********************14. This Is Not Real Love (with Mutya)
15. An Easier Affair

Download 1 CD (109.10 MB)
Download 2 CD (100.56 MB)
rar password - "123"


Named in reference to the number of years spent in the music business, 'TwentyFive' chronicles the career of one of Britain's most popular, yet controversialartists. From early Wham tracks such as 'Wake Me Up Before You Go Go' and 'LastChristmas' to more recent favourites, including 'Jesus To A Child' and'Outside', 'Twenty Five' also includes previously unreleased duets with Paul McCartney and ex-Sugababe Mutya.