On a completely non-musicological note, I wish to direct your attention to a blog. It's written by my cousin-in-law Nick Russell, and his girlfriend Lizzie Wade. He's a photographer and she's a writer, and the two of them are driving around the country this summer "visiting sites related to the past, present and possible futures of American high energy physics research." This means places like Fermilab, Lawrence Livermore, the former planned site of the Superconducting Super Collider in Texas, and so on. The bulk of their work is directed towards various publishing and art projects for later, but their snapshots and brief thoughts about the trip are fascinating.
One thing I've noticed about reactions to Michael Jackson's death, at least among children of the 1980s such as myself, has been the desire to recount one's initial introduction to his music. It's kind of like the opposite of the baby-boomer obsession with recounting where you were when JFK was shot. For them, the death of a president, for us the birth of the King of Pop.
My story is that I was about five years old, I think, so about 1985 or so, and I was at a neighbor's house, hanging out with my best friend. He had, presumably through his parents, a cassette tape of Thriller, and we listened to it together. The song that most stuck out for me at the time was "Beat It," Jackson's groundbreaking collaboration with Eddie Van Halen. Little five-year-old Phil went toddling around singing "Don't wanna see no blood, don't be a macho man, just beat it" for weeks afterward.
If you're the sort of person who cares about "periodicity," the study of how we organize history into culturally thematic lengths of time, or periods, a fairly simple argument to make is that Michael Jackson was one of the first great postmodern musicians in popular music. At least, that's true in the sense of postmodernism most often used in musicology, where it is largely characterized by mixing different stylistic characteristics and historical periods. Michael Jackson's work in the early 1980s took the always-already postmodernism of 1970s soul and added heavy metal, horror movies, and science fiction fantasy.
There might also, in Jackson's work, be what Fredric Jameson influentially called a "waning of affect," or a decline of the "aesthetic of expression." I don't mean this in a bad way at all. It's not that there is no expression in Jackson's music, it's that there is too much of it, so much that emotions are presented over-simplified, almost parodied, and iterated to the point of exhaustion. For example, if you or I were to grab our crotch while dancing, that gesture would most likely be read as having some sort of sexual meaning. But when Michael Jackson grabbed his crotch, the grab was so fluid and stylized, and repeated so often, that it ceased to have meaning. Or, to go back to Jameson, consider Jackson's last great hit, the 1995 duet with his little sister, "Scream."
(The video is still the most expensive music video of all time; they don't call it late capitalism for nothing.)
Consider Jameson's description of Edward Munch's Scream:
"a canonical expression of the great modernist thematics of alientation, anomie, solitude, social fragmentation, and isolate, a virtually programmatic emblem of what used to be called the age of anxiety. It will here be read as an embodiment not merely of hte expression of that kind of affect but, even more, as a virtual deconstruction of the very aesthetic of expression itself, which seems to have dominated much of what we call high modernism but to have vanished away—for both practical and theoretical reasons—in the world of the postmodern."
That's a fair description of the Jackson/Jackson scream as well, I'd say.
On the other hand: I was watching the endless loop of Michael Jackson commentary on the BBC today, and one random news anchor related a quote from Fred Astaire regarding Jackson I had never heard before. Jackson, Astaire supposedly said, danced with "rage in his feet."
There is indeed so much rage in Jackson's music, dance, and imagery. So much so that it threatens to spill out of its neat postmodern boxes. What is its source, and what does it mean? It has to do with Jackson's own body, I'd say, which more than any other performer I can think of has always been the source of constant speculation and analysis. It's hard to say anything new about it, but I do think it is fair to say that Jackson had an unusually visible relationship with his own body. Many have called it a case of body dysmorphic disorder (the same diagnosis often given transpeople, by well-meaning-or-not psychiatrists.) I couldn't say if that's true or not, or if that Jackson's situation is even particularly unusual; who doesn't have body issues? But Jackson did have a fairly spectacular response to whatever issues might have been there. There was on the one hand the constant sculpting and re-sculpting of the flesh itself: surgery, chemicals, dieting, working out, who knows what else. And then there was that dancing. Invariably described as "fluid," it articulates a vision of the human body unlike anything else I have seen. It's not Merce Cunningham, who uses a rigid anti-expressionism to force the body into new situations. A move like the moonwalk takes a recognizable element of coporeal vocabulary, and transforms it as if mechanically produced. And yet, of course, it wasn't, it's still just Michael Jackson on stage with a pair of shoes. I'm not very sophisticated at dance criticism, so I don't even know what to say beyond that. But it blows my mind, and although it might not be a product of the aesthetic of expression, I wouldn't go so far as to say that it is missing an affect.
After all, bodies, and performances, have been at the heart of many critiques of Fredric Jameson's work on postmodernism. Mandy Merck, for example, has pointed out the unnecessary binary between "real" and "artificial" that underlies much of his essay, especially when offering up the famous Van Gogh versus Warhol comparison. Judith Halberstam goes so far as to call Jameson's approach homophobic for its implicit privileging of modernism/materialism/heterosexuality over Warhol's critique. I don't agree all the way with Halberstam (and I like Jameson a lot as you can probably tell), but I do think he underestimates the potential of the performing human body, if he reads it at all.
What I admired most about Jackson was his sense of agency, at least at the height of his career. He made his body do what he wanted it to do,and that's no easy task under postmodernism. The sadness I feel now is that ultimately, he lost that agency, just as it looked like he might have been on the verge of taking it back.
I would apologize for not blogging these past few weeks, but I have good excuses: it was the end of the semester, I'm in the middle of moving house, and, well, it was the end of the semester. But more importantly, Mary and I are on our honeymoon. No, we didn't renew our vows or anything, this was just the first free week we've had since we got married a year and a half ago. If you need to reach me, I'm on this beach.
How interesting is it that Merce Cunningham and Pete Seeger are almost exactly the same age. Both were born in 1919, Merce on April 16th and Pete on May 3. Both still going strong!
Okay, this post is mostly an excuse to include my favorite recent Times photo, the above tasty Hungarian hairy pigs.
But also, you might have read that the University of Delaware has recently been infested with the flu of the swine. Or H1N1 flu as we're now supposed to call it, so that no more countries accidentally order all of their pigs slaughtered. (And I guess it is better than "Mexican flu.") My students seem to be taking it in stride. Attendance is down a little bit, and the janitorial staff are having trouble keeping enough soap in the bathrooms, but the mood is largely one of resigned humor. One enterprising student is selling "Swine '09" t-shirts; I really hope I can get one. Luckily the flu does not seem to have struck the music department. Thank goodness, because the teaching of music tends to involve more physical proximity than most subjects. Lots of sitting in enclosed studios, lots of sharing instruments, lots of spit on the ground. If one music major gets it, I fear we are all doomed.
The one sad thing is that all public events have been cancelled, including the semester's opera performance, Pirates of Penzance. We all know how much work goes into these college operas. It's the first major role for many of the singers, and everyone's been rehearsing all semester. The show is hopefully going to be rescheduled for a later date, but it's a rough time of year to find a free evening. So far the various student recitals for the weekend are a go; cross your fingers.
I wish I could be happier about the whole Specter switcheroo. Honestly, I think it is bad for us ("us" being the forces of truth and justice) in the long run. Sure, it's a great media narrative today, and I love reading articles about the permanent demise of the Republican Party as much as anyone else.
But.
Let's think about the practical consequences. First of all, Specter is going to vote more or less the same way he always has, which is to say, as a conservative with brief moments of sanity. He's apparently still going to oppose EFCA, and hold up Dawn Johnson's nomination. I suspect that if Anita Hill were to show up in front of the Judiciary Committee today, he'd still do his best to browbeat and humiliate her.
Secondly, this means that it is going to be a lot more difficult to replace Specter with a real Democrat. Until this, there were two scenarios in play. Option A, Specter is defeated by Toomey in the primary, and just about any Democratic candidate wins in the general. Option B, Specter loses in primary, runs as an independent, a fairly strong Democratic candidate wins the divided vote. Now, we're stuck with him for the forseeable future: the Democratic machine from Rendell up to Obama has pledged to campaign for him.
The thing about Specter is that he could care less about his "ideals" and his marginalization within the Republican Party. I mean, the Republican Party has been in its current ideological state arguably since Gingrich and Company circa 1994, and certainly for the last nine years. In his last primary, conservatives were trying just as hard to unseat him. The Republican Party has not changed in the last decade; the only thing that has changed is that political conditions have aligned to finally push him out of office.
Now, Olympia Snowe on the other hand...that would be cool.
Philadelphia is going through a horrendous heat wave at the moment. Highs in the lower 90s, lows in the 60s. Summer weather, in other words, which is all fine and dandy if one doesn't have to look presentable five days a week in front of judgmental undergraduates. (Except for the ones who read this blog; I'm sure you're not judgmental. But your friends are.)
Most of the calendar year I love the costume of the male academic. The tweed, the argyle, the sweater vests (haven't gone there yet myself, but oh, I will), the ubiquitous elbow patch. One of my professors in graduate school once told me that back in the early radical days of New Musicology, he and his colleagues made an effort to dress somewhat stylishly, as a marker of difference against the old guard. I can appreciate that strategy, but as a member of Generation Y to their Generation X (or a "Millenial Musicologist," as Ryan would say), I personally embrace the quirkiness of all tweed, all the time. If I had the money, that is; good academic clothes don't come cheap, and I'm slowly building up the appropriate wardrobe.
On the other side of things, we all know that it has historically been difficult for women academics to find the right balance in their dress of projecting academic authority without looking like Meg Whitman. All joking aside, unlike the male professor who can just roll out of bed and don tweed, a woman runs the risk of fairly severe consequences for her career if the wrong choice is made. (See judgmental students, above.) But if there is one thing I envy about women's academic clothing, it's that it is much more flexible when it comes to temperature. Because as the thermometer climbs here in Philly, I've begun to dread the walk from my car to the music building. There just simply aren't many good ways to look like a professor without becoming a sweaty mess.
This is about to become particularly fraught as I've taken a job for next year at the College of William and Mary. It's a visiting assistant professor job, a one-year sabbatical replacement, and I'm thrilled about it. Not only is it actual full-time employment with benefits and a humane teaching load, but W&M has a long tradition of American music research that I will be honored to be part of. So as I say, I'm thrilled.
But...it's also in Southern Virginia. And I struggle enough to keep myself un-sweaty up here in Philadelphia. Five and a half hours south, and it's going to be grim.
Any words of advice? How does one maintain academic garb in the south? A former professor of mine in Los Angeles owned a white linen suit, but I can't really pull that off. Shorts are obviously out; I think it is written somewhere in the faculty handbook that a male professor's knees should never be seen. Short sleeves and a tie? Pretty soon I'd look like I worked for NASA in the 1960s. What to do?
Doing anything this upcoming Friday night, April 24, at 7:30 pm? Live in the Philadelphia area?
You should come see my little sister sing the role of the Countess in The Marriage of Figaro, in a production directed by Marc Astafan at Temple University.
It is astonishing how few respectable conceptual tools we have for dealing with this self-evident fact. A tiny number of inconceivably coarse axes of categorization have been painstakingly inscribed in current critical and political thought: gender, race, class, nationality, sexual orientation are pretty much the available distinctions. They, with the associated demonstrations of the mechanisms by which they are constructed and reproduced, are indispensable, and they may indeed override all or some other forms of difference and similarity. But the sister or brother, the best friend, the classmate, the parent, the child, the lover, the ex-: our families, lovers, and enmities alike, not to mention the strange relations of our work, play, and activism, prove that even people who share all or most of our own positionings along these crude axes may still be different enough from us, and from each other, to seem like all but different species.
There's an old joke about academia, that the fighting is so vicious because the stakes are so small. Which is, of course, totally true. But Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who passed away this weekend, was the rare critic who made the stakes much larger. I honestly can think of few other academics I have admired more. In my head I have an approximately 20,000 word-long blog post about how much her work and career means to me, but I think I'll stop here, leaving you with the first axiom from her epochal 1990 book Epistemology of the Closet. Roxie's World has a good roundup of memorials.
I can't decide if this year's Job Wiki has been good or bad for our profession. I'm sure that for many of us the answer has been obvious--it's been dreadful. Have you seen it recently? The discussion sections have become a swirling rampage of doom and derision. The simplest questions have brought upon their posers a torrent of abuse. Snideness and terror run amok. False rumors are spread willy-nilly, useful discussions are summarily (and anonymously) deleted. Job postings were hidden until after the deadline date. The nadir was when one anonymous participant threatened to commit suicide if s/he didn't find employment by year's end. A few urged him or her to seek help, but really, what can you do?
Really, it's been brutal. I think most of us have ascribed the rising invective to the corresponding diminution of the market itself. No surprise to anyone, but the academic job market was a shadow itself this year. The Job Wiki has seemed like a pack of wolves fighting over the last measly shreds of a carcass.
But it's also our disciplinary culture. I've often heard it said that musicology is more polite than other disciplines, the reasoning being that because we are so small, there is less room to hide from an enemy than at, say, an MLA conference. There's a very small group of people out there who might be called upon to referee your grant application, or give you a job, or peer review your article, and it would be best not to have spit upon them previously. I also think that another factor is that unlike some other humanities disciplines, musicology is still foundationally organized around a nostalgic and romantic attachment to the canon. By which I mean, we were all once nerds who played in our high school orchestras, and despite some diversification, many of us come from very, very similar backgrounds.
Let's also be honest with ourselves. "Politeness" in our discipline is often of the barest superficiality. Because while it's true there's not a whole lot of, you know, cursing, or whatever, at our national meetings, there is I think a pretty fundamental lack of respect in our discipline. When certain other musicology bloggers refer to entire fields of scholarship as "Victim Studies", it might not be "impolite," per se, and might not rise to the level of vitriol on this year's job wiki. Nevertheless, that kind of comment betrays fundamental disrespect for his colleagues in the discipline who work in such areas.
Which goes both ways of course. I work in those very corners of musicology Jonathan often derides, and yes, in these corners I have often heard (and perhaps uttered myself when being foolish) disrespectful things about other scholarly approaches, and implicitly those people who practice them. Disrespect cuts across ideological divides in musicology. I think we would all agree that scholarship should ideally be a collaboration, or at least a conversation. But if you result to name-calling and willful ignorance, then any conversation is immediately shut down.
But at any rate, this is the sort of impoliteness that does actually pervade our discipline. We've all seen this at AMS meetings, when scholarly turfs are defended against interlopers and graduate students berated for lack of sufficient hommage to their forebearers. And even more frequently, whenever we roll our eyes at a research topic or approach, before even knowing anything about it. And it ends up having real consequences for people's careers; for how books are reviewed, papers accepted, hires made.
So back to the question: is this year's job wiki good or bad? Well, of course it is extremely unpleasant to read, and I find myself avoiding it more and more. But sometimes, I'd rather have the animosity out in the open where I can see it.
