Monday Links and Bullets

• The academic blogosphere's two most famous fathers duke it out: Michael Bérubé versus Dean Dad on questions of tenure and academic freedom. So far Michael is winning the "sense of humor" points.
  
• Ah, so that's why Terry Teachout did a Louis Armstrong biography. I was wondering what his angle was going to be.
  
• I forgot to link this earlier, but Tamara Levitz's expanded commentary on the annual meeting program selection process is a fascinating read. Not to drag out and again beat a certain dead horse, but remember how one of Ilias "Will Never Work in This Field Again" Chrissochoidis's complaints about the annual meeting was that "Derrida, Bakhtin, and Adorno are topics more welcome than composers and their work"? I always found that statement particularly amusing, and even went to the trouble of doing a simple keyword search of the program booklets of the last three annual meetings. You'll be happy to know that the word "Derrida" does not appear once. Anyways, Tamara's commentary is very thought-provoking along some of these lines.
  
• An friend of mine was tasered during the protests of the UC Regents meeting last week. Tasered on the back, while sitting down. No link here, because there seems not to be much coverage. Just wanted to tell someone about it.
  
• I hear the SEM annual meeting in Mexico went well! Slim attendance, but to be expected with the way travel funding is these days. Kudos to SEM for crossing the border, and more valiantly then say, meeting in Quebec City or Ottawa.
  
• The Teh-Drinking Musicologist has a characteristically interesting and idiosyncratic take on the "Ecomusicology" study group session at AMS.
  
• A tale of copyright infringement gone wrong: Awhile back, I went to see the Frida Kahlo exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and in my report on the show I included a picture of Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and Leon Trotsky chatting with each other. I had cheerfully scanned that photo myself out of the show's catalogue, no doubt breaking all sorts of copyright laws. And thus I seem to have invited karmic retribution. There is a horrible little web site called Conservapedia, which purports to counter the liberal bias of Wikipedia by offering a politically sanitized peer-edited encyclopedia to the world. (One of their more notorious projects includes attempting a new translation of the bible that leaves out any language that might imply Jesus was a liberal.) Well, somebody on that site has now stolen my stolen image (with attribution to me, to be fair), and is using it as an illustration on their articles about Trotskyism and Diego Rivera. Sigh.
  
  

And finally something to wake up on this dreary, rainy, Monday. I can't say it enough: God bless YouTube. I haven't seen Peter Greenaway's film since my first year in college, and here it is for free on the internets.