Golublog: An Anthropology Blog » Websites

Carlos Mondragon has a blog

Alex — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 05:43:56 +0000

“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.

Hilary Hahn has a blog

Alex — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 18:40:46 +0000

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.

ASOPA Blog

Alex — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 22:06:35 +0000

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.

Decomposing the world, part deux

Alex — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 09:16:58 +0000

I’m fascinated by theorycrafting websites and was just turned on to “maxdps.com”:http://maxdps.com/ — amazing geekery.

Porgera blog

Alex — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 21:14:38 +0000

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.

Protest Barrick website

Alex — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 04:41:49 +0000

More on the activist front — there is now a “protestbarrick.net”:http://www.protestbarrick.net/ website with information about Barrick and campaigns against it.

New OI website

Alex — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 21:14:19 +0000

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.

Howard Schwartz’s website

Alex — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 20:28:47 +0000

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.

Greg Costikyan Is My Master Now

Alex — Sat, 26 Aug 2006 06:33:20 +0000

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!

Introducing ThisLine

Alex — Wed, 02 Nov 2005 18:07:16 +0000

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.