“He cannot hide from me.”:http://salul.wordpress.com/
For everyone who was wondering about the ancient and enduring ties between Mexico and Vanuatu, look no further.
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I recently finished teaching Intro to Anthro, and for one of the last sessions I taught Kiri Miller’s conference paper on “Guitar Hero’s Rock Pedagogy”:http://guitarheroresearch.blogspot.com/2008/05/guitar-heros-rock-pedagogy-iaspm-us.html which is a great piece on an even more fascinating topic — Guitar Hero. As I was preparing for class I thought about how restricted our conversation about Guitar Hero would be because so few students had a sense of what real technical virtuosity in music making is like. After some googling I just said “screw it, half way through the class I’ll just show a youtube video of Hilary Hahn playing the final movement of the Sibelius violin concerto.” This went well — one student said that her fingers looked “CGId” because, you know, we all know that humans can’t really do that and it must have been a special effect. But, more to the point, I began googling Hilary Hahn some more.
I choose to show the Hahn performance for the rather poor reason that it was top hit in most of the search engines I tried for various combinations of ‘Sibelius concerto violin’. I had some vague sense that she was some physically striking prodigy who put out albums of Standard Romantic Showpieces With Covers Depicting Physically Striking Young Women Clutching Violins To Their Barely Concealed Chests which has become sort of a thing as major classical labels desperately try to get people to keep listening to their albums.
As it turns out, in fact, Hahn is a fascinating and articulate person who has been keeping an online journal since the late 90s and has “blog entries going back to 2002″:http://www.hilaryhahn.com/journal.shtml. She posts regularly, has “short pieces”:http://www.hilaryhahn.com/ittybitty.shtml, “a youtube channel”:http://www.youtube.com/hilaryhahnvideos, “twitter alerts”:http://twitter.co/violincase, and all manner of other things.
Frankly, I’m not a big fan of twitter and don’t watch that much youtube — but thanks for the channel Hilary, 60 people who never heard that Sibelius now have had a taste — but I have to really give it up for the blog entry and another recent, longer “thoughtful piece on crossing musical genres”:http://www.artsjournal.com/npac/2008/05/new-avenues-in-collaboration.html. Its great to see an artist be so thoughtful in public about what they do. I was really impressed.
I knew about the “ASOPA website”;http://www.asopa.com.au/ for some time, but didn’t know there was a “blog”:http://asopa.typepad.com/asopa_people/ as well. Awesome.
I’m fascinated by theorycrafting websites and was just turned on to “maxdps.com”:http://maxdps.com/ — amazing geekery.
Sssshhh…. don’t tell Barrick, but “one of their employees is blogging”:http://davidwillms.blogspot.com/ about life in Porgera. This is great for me, since the group that I had least access to during my research in Porgera was expatriate miners. It makes for interesting reading about what a white miner thinks about the “crazies” that live “on the other side of the fence” at Porgera, something I don’t know much about since my specialty was living with said crazies. Williams is right that Porgerans consider white people chewing betelnut hilarious, but I am not sure about the two Ps he put in “Ippili” and the two Gs in “cigarette.”
I actually feel bad pointing up this blog. I have no idea what PJV’s policy on blogging is but I imagine that too much publicity will just get thing thing rolled up by management.
More on the activist front — there is now a “protestbarrick.net”:http://www.protestbarrick.net/ website with information about Barrick and campaigns against it.
I am trying to blog more and more regularly. Can you tell? This entry is about how beautiful the “new OI website”:http://oi.uchicago.edu/ is. Always nice to see a Hittite dictionary project get the website it deserves.
Out of the blue the other day Savage minds got “a comment from Howard (Eilberg-)Schwartz”:http://savageminds.org/2006/04/28/savage-jews/#comment-53589. I think of him as the Rabbi Who Reads Levi-Strauss, but apparently since then he has become a business executive and now lectures on the intersection of spirituality and corporate social responsibility. He has a “new website”:http://www.freedomandcapitalism.com/ with information about him and his books, an an especially valuable offer to sell you a PDF of his book _The Savage In Judaism_ for US$10. Of course since he’s now rich and doesn’t need the money I think he should just make it available open access under a Creative Commons license, but that’s just me. At any rate if you’ve tried to piece together who this guy is based on his somewhat fragmentary Google-trail now there’s a one-stop Schwartz stop for your convenience.
Those of us who grew up in the tail-end of the Cold War know Greg Costikyan as the Leonardo da Vinci of serious gamer geekdom. He didn’t just _write_ games, he wrote _great_ games like Paranoia. And the games he wrote were smart, funny, and insightful. Since then he’s gone on to produce popular fiction which is equally incisive — his novel “First Contract”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0812545494/sr=8-1/qid=1156573037/ref=pd_bbs_1/002-0329361-8750447?ie=UTF8 is an absolute must for any academic thinking seriously about globalization or culture contact or neoliberal governmentality. Yes really. His knowlede of the history of table top gaming is also truly staggering, and for the past couple of years his blogging and other writing on the gaming industry has been excellent.
So his latest effort “Manifesto Games”:http://www.manifestogames.com/ is something I feel biologically compelled to write about. It doesn’t take long surfing around the site to figure out exactly what is going on — an indie games program wrapped around a content delivery system wrapped around a bunch of well-designed but not Oblivion-beautiful games. Anybody who remembers the Good Old Days of Oregon Trail will find themselves at home on the sight — they even have “Taipan”:http://www.manifestogames.com/node/1058!
So… go buy something from them now!
When fellow college radio DJs Seth Sanders, J Niimi, and I get together in the same room and start talking about music, the air becomes thick with ozone and strange and powerful thoughts start oozing out of our ears and intertwining with one another like a scene out of Dark City. unforunately we have been scattered to the four corners of the earth (or, to be more exact, Chicago, Ithaca NY, and Honolulu) so we’ve greated a group music blog to keep up with what we’re listening to. As a result I am happy to introduce “This Line”:http://www.evil-wire.org/~thisline/, our new MP3 blog. Seth does Death Metal, I do contemporary choral music, and J does Sissy Rock. I am hoping that the blog will take off as I have a very good feeling about these two gentlemen.
Why? Because the Encyclopedia Brittanica has never even _heard_ of “Spam musubi”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spam_musubi.
“Steve”:http://www.onepotmeal.com/ has “won the 60 second story competition”:http://grandtextauto.gatech.edu/2005/06/14/and-the-winner-is/. Gratz to him. Do you know why he won? Because _Steve writes really well_. He deserved to win, that’s why. Yeah Steve!
Today on Amazon.com trying to track down the citation for “In The Name of Hawai’ians”:http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/H/halualani_in.html I discovered that “Noenoe Silva”:http://www.politicalscience.hawaii.edu/Faculty/silva/nsilva.htm has an “amazon profile”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/clm/ref=cm_aya_ac_addfriend/002-3949094-5952040?form-customer-links=A3V8M4YZ7J4U86&cl.A3V8M4YZ7J4U86=favorite-member&result-template=tg/cm/member-glance/-/A3V8M4YZ7J4U86. It’s somewhat brief (although there is a very decent list on “Hawai’i by Hawai’ians: Beyond Tourist Propoganda”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/listmania/list-browse/-/PKDX9GDGTVXW/ref=cm_aya_lm_title.more/002-3949094-5952040). What struck me about it was her nickname — Noe1893. I am all for academic geekdom, but somehow this just struck me as a little off. Kind of like me making my amazon nickname ‘rexkristallnacht’ or something more mild but equally reminiscent of politically and ethnic disaster. Maybe it’s meant to remind people they should never forget “what happened in 1893″:http://college.hmco.com/history/readerscomp/rcah/html/ah_041000_hawaiiannexa.htm, and to remember what life was like in the islands in the 1,893 years _before_ the white guys took over? Hard to tell. The very fact that I saw ‘noe1893′ and immediately realized who it was and what 1893 meant clearly indicates I myself am rapidly becoming an Annexation Geek.
I am pleased to announce the launch of a new website entitled “Savage Minds”:http://savageminds.org/. It’s an anthropology group blog which I am a contributor to. I’m excited because the site looks great thanks to Kerim’s hard work (and yes, those _are_ pensée sauvage on the masthead) and the entries — which now number up to a grand total of five! — have so far been very impressive. And I’m not just saying that because almost half of them are by me. Really, I am looking forward to seeing Savage Minds grow, and I hope that in the future it will gain the wide readership it deserves. Please do “check it out”:http://savageminds.org/ if you’re interested.
If you’re not interested, and don’t care one wit about anthropology, and just want more Anne Kawharu fan fiction, then stay tuned here — now that I’m contributing professionally to Savage Minds, this blog will now revert to random recipes and lightsaber fighting.
I don’t know what strange synergy sparked this, but in fact yes, I have been obsessively reading both “Ant and Idea”:http://ideant.typepad.com/ideant/ant_idea/index.html _and_ “Edison Hate Future”:http://www.warrenellis.com/index.php?cat=31.
Every years or so I trawl the blogosphere for PNG-related websites. Unfortunately, they tend to be either ephemeral or not that helpful or forums and (for some reason) me hates to use forums. However, my blog recently got pinged by the mind behind “PNG life”:http://pnglife.blogspot.com/ and hence blogrolled over to “Sepik Mom”:http://www.sepikmom.com/ and “Bomana Nights”:http://bomana.blogspot.com/. Blogspot changes the world in yet another small and slightly unexpected way.
Two cool things. First: fellow UofC alumn “Marc ‘Fertilizer Has Brought Poison’ Auslander has a blog”:http://www.bjournals.com/users/mausland/ over at Brandeis, where he teaches. Second: “everybody at Brandeis has (or could have) a blog”:http://www.bjournals.com/ thanks to the ginormous LiveJournal install that the computer users group has got over there. That is awesome. I wonder if the amount of XFiles fan fic at Brandeis will now mysteriously start to grow…?
Err…. I know that sounds like a bad pr0n site, but in fact there are two very cool OpenDirs of pictures from PNG that some random person (too long to explain who) has left open to the public. One is apparently from a trip he and his girlfriend made to “the Tolukuma Gold Mine”:http://dj.dynamo.online.fr/tolukuma/ while the other, shorter series, features spelunking around “Alotau”:http://dj.dynamo.online.fr/alotau/. There’s even a picture of them with Peter Ipatas! It looks like they took a side-trip to Ok Tedi and then stopped either at the Hides gas plant or at Ambua Lodge.
!http://alex.golub.name/pics/vacation.jpg!
These pictures are basically what fieldwork was like for me and it’s fascinating to see someone else’s photos of them. The gold pour they witnessed is, like all pictures of gold pours, not as interesting as being there. Additionally, they commit the sin of trying to take pictures during a helicopter trip. Please note: pictures from helicopters are never anywhere as NEAR fantastic as just going on a helicopter trip and convey nothing of the awesomeness of PNG’s terrain to the uninitiated. It just looks fuzzy. If you ever find yourself in a Longranger crossing a barrier range, don’t take a picture. Just soak it all in — it’ll last longer. Trust me.
The “new Serenity trailer”:http://www.apple.com/trailers/universal/serenity/ is up.
And yes, it is shiny.
The blog’s title: “The Problem of Social Reality”:http://peteralevin.com/blog/. The tagline: “Schutz, I did it again”. That _slays_ me. Uh… actually, _is_ that funny, or is all this work on my dissertation (due on _Monday_) starting to drive me batty? I think I may be loosing my _own_ grip on social reality. You be the judge.
It’s by a sociology prof at Barnard. For a brief moment I thought My Favorite Anthro Prof At Barnard (the one who, unlike me, prefers Spike to Angel — you know who you are, you) was running an anonyblog, but in fact it is Just Another Phenomenology Geek.
In other news, the excellent “Serving The Word”:http://servingtheword.blogspot.com/ blog appears to be up and running again. Let’s hope Seth can keep these new posts as l33t as his previous ones were. Happy Charleton Heston/Yul Brenner Week, Seth!
There are two cool sites I found this weekend. “The Accomplice”:http://www.theaccomplice.org/main.php is a hip semi-alterno literary group website co-founded by an anthropologist. It is good, although obviously I remain more fond of the the hip semi-alterno literary group website that “I helped co-found”:http://gapersblock.com/
Also, at the intersection of “Anne Galloway”:http://www.purselipsquarejaw.org/, “Graham Leushcke”:http://www.leuschke.org/Main/Log and “Megulon 5″:http://www.dclxvi.org/megulon5/ is “angermann2″:http://www.angermann2.com/. Rock.
via “Mack Daddy I”:http://bookninja.blogspot.com/
In an earlier version of my Anthropology of Virtual Worlds syllabus I incorrectly attributed the pieces “bow, nigger” and “possessing Barbie” to Jim Rossignol when they were in fact by always_black, who runs the the website (wait for it) alwaysblack.com. Sorry for the confusion, AB. It’s a good site and if you haven’t yet read Bow, nigger you should definitely check it out.