We Make Interestingness

I love me some contrasting stripes. A lovely public art installation in front of UQÀM, Place Pasteur.

ey folks, salut de Montréal! I’ve had “write articles for blog” on my to-do list for the last month or so, but then real life keeps on being inconvenient. At the moment, I’m in Montréal for the AAA meeting (American Anthropological Association), which is a massive 7000-person mega-conference. I gave a paper last Wednesday, spent the rest of the week going to far too many papers, dropped an obscene amount of money at The Bay buying proper Canadian winter clothing, and now I’m preparing to go give a guest lecture in a seminar at UQÀM (Université de Québec à Montréal). I’m still planning on finishing the series of summaries of my dissertation chapters—and I have an interesting report on the BerMuDa weekend in Berlin, too—but here’s a short little thing to tide us all over. Oh, and by the way, I heard that, way over at the Society for Ethnomusicology conference (SEM), I was awarded the Lise Waxer Student Paper prize for the paper I gave last year. Yay! Incidentally, the paper was drawn from one of my dissertation chapters on “liquidarity”.

So, I once made a sort of joke-motto with some fellow humanities grad students that went something like this: “The Humanities: We Make Interestingness.” This was in response to

From Detroit/Montréal with love

ey folks.

Yes, I know; I’ve been rather lax in updating my blog lately. I’ve pretty much disappeared off the face of the earth for a couple of weeks. I’ve had a houseguest with me in Chicago for a while, and then we set off to Detroit and later Montréal for various electronic music festivals (DEMF/Movement and Mutek, respetively). I’m hearing lots of great music and having lots of interesting encounters that will make for some very amusing reading sometime soon, but for now it’s all I can do to take some shorthand notes and keep going. As it is, I’m missing an experimental electronics concert to write this (I think I’ll be able to catch the last part of it). In the meanwhile, here’s one of my favorite pictures of the Detroit Electronic Music Festival / Movement.

The "SHXT SHOW" party at the TV Lounge