Donkey Hottie

Eurovision and neoliberalism: the case of InCulto

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 00:26:20 +0000

I have been posting of late, just not here. I’ve put up three posts over at Lithchat discussing the Eurovision Song Contest, in particular the song chosen by the Lithuanian people to represent them at the contest, the subversive “Eastern European Funk.” The first post merely introduces the song with a few video clips thrown in. The [...]

Life during wartime

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 14:22:26 +0000

I finally saw The Hurt Locker, after wanting to see it forever. I don’t remember what about the original reviews or trailers made me think I’d like it, but the absolute orgy of praise it has received in the months since release only built up the interest. And now, I don’t get it. I think the [...]

Ames, Taibbi, Moscow, and missing the boat

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 10:55:31 +0000

I wrote a little something about James Verini’s fascinating Vanity Fair article about the Moscow newspaper, the eXile, edited by Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi, over on Lithchat. Mostly, the piece prompted an opportunity to think about how my own experiences during the ’90s, especially as they pertained to Eastern Europe, would have been different [...]

Cultural neuroscience to the rescue of us lost humanists?

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 13:25:42 +0000

Even though in my last post I tried to describe the movement towards “doing scholarship in public” that forms a background for three different levels of academic fights these days, it still seems sometimes like the “humanities is a waste of time” fight remains the most salient. After all, if one takes that waste of time [...]

Making this worth it by going to the streets

Sat, 20 Feb 2010 16:19:41 +0000

This is, I imagine, the much shorter version of a post I have had simmering in my head for a few weeks now–or, well, actually, many of the issues dovetail with another post that’s been around since new years. But somehow I haven’t sat down to figure out my point rigorously yet, and so I [...]

Crazy Signs

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 14:19:11 +0000

Sometime around 1987, our whole family went on a trip to the Club Med village at Punta Cana, in the Dominican Republic. Each of the big trips we took (about biennially) left lasting impressions on me, and the Club Med experience completely floored me. There is so much I did there that I have never [...]

Should one mourn national literature(s)?

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 20:13:16 +0000

There’s a frustrating article by Tim Parks up on the NYRBlog now about the the dull new global novel. I’ll save the breezy history of the novel Parks provides (making an economic and democratic case for moving to the vernacular from Latin) and furnish his closing two paragraphs, which turn the whine into vermouth: If culture-specific [...]

The economy is still busted, a graffiti story

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 15:01:55 +0000

This photo I took in early December. I was in the Marais, found this interesting, and snapped it. It’s on the wall of a branch of HSBC, a huge bank. A “Cahier des charges” seems to be a “scope statement” or some such businessy thing I don’t understand. But the rest of the text is French [...]

The pleasant death of the national identity debate

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 18:03:47 +0000

While the big discussion in Washington (other than the snow) lately seems to have been the atavistic Tea Party Convention and the various fantasies of the American that were put on display within (I won’t link to anything since, remember, I’m no longer reading about US politics), the debate about national identity in France, an [...]

Adrift and up in the air

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 10:47:31 +0000

Is Up in the Air (or, as it is called in France, In the Air) a complicated movie? Or is it simply a sloppy one? Bryan called the movie too long, but then he also called it depressing. But I felt uplifted at the end, largely since I was very excited to finally see a [...]

America our nation has been beaten by strangers who have bought the laws

Fri, 22 Jan 2010 23:56:36 +0000

Holy smokes was I not surprised by the decision this week by the Supreme Court in Citizens United v. FEC. I was always suspicious of the argument that “money is not speech, it’s property,” though I repeated it several times. I agree with Bryan, in that I can’t really imagine that a pesky little thing [...]

The Gun and the Bible carved this nation

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 16:58:19 +0000

When Free came out in 1993, “The Gun and Bible” was instantly my favorite track. It’s a funny and absurd song, funny and absurd in the way that genocide is funny and absurd, that manages, by twisting and repeating one bizarre sample (discounting the coda about drinking and shooting), to efface the cold objectivity of [...]

Task managing a dissertation

Sat, 16 Jan 2010 12:57:39 +0000

The problem of the war machine, or the firing squad: is a general necessary for n individuals to manage to fire in unison? Our applications for dissertation fellowships are due at the end of February, which means that I’ve had my sole chapter on the mind quite a bit lately, even while wasting most of yesterday [...]

America is turning into Baltimore

Thu, 14 Jan 2010 20:54:58 +0000

My love of The Wire connects pretty well with my interest in David Harvey, who taught at Hopkins for a long time and treated Baltimore as an immense site for empirical geographical work. I also suspect that the show’s taking place in Baltimore is part of Walter Benn Michael’s fascination with it, which he’s polished [...]

The Kid A poundup

Thu, 14 Jan 2010 11:14:23 +0000

Quickly. I oversold the IDM-ness of Kid A. I let “Idioteque” speak for the album as a whole (this is probably largely since when the album would come on at parties, it was when it reached this song that I knew for a fact that it was Radiohead. Up until then, it was just noise). [...]