five things
1. wedding planning is fun. Well, it's great fun since it's not my wedding and it's not my budget and i get to do the cool things like come up with ideas. our friend's getting married in march, it's a 30 person deal, and it's going to be superfabulous in the most relaxed and fun ways. Working a little bit on it yesterday reminded me how much I like event planning - it's all there and it all comes together right in front of you.
2. thursday was the day of fabulous women mentors - Dar and I were talking about it in the car on the way back home and I've been blessed in my life with amazing women who have guided (and continue) to guide and mentor me. My mom, for one, the strongest woman I know. My stepmom, who's probably the second as far as that goes. My first real "boss" Sara at HUC, who taught me how to do things methodically, and how to be kindof human sometimes. My first real mentor/boss Paula at FTM, who was so awesome in so many ways, and even though she was a micromanager, too, she knew how to back off once I did things the way she wanted and needed - she was the first one that showed me managing is a series of calculations and risks you have to be willing to make. And now I've got these two phenominal women professors who are not only part of my academic environment, but who are on my side in all of the best intellectual ways. My advisor is fiercely inteligent and amazing and ... keeps me in line, so all of my crazy emotional engagements in text become logical, proved, canny and savy observations. And now I've got my asian horror film prof who not only heard what I wanted to work on, but fiured out HOW i was going to do that. This is the moment, I think, the turning point moment, when I really start to move from being a kind of generalist to actual scholarship, and I am so fantastically lucky to have these women as my means of support (and seriously, they shouldn't be in texas - one is from berkely and the other's from georgetown of all places... they should NOT be wasting their talents here.... except for the happy luck that i'm here and get to be inspired by them)
3. last night was delightful and fantastic - celebrated mrtwstedwhsprs' birthday last night at the only goth club in town. There was dancing, grinning, much talking, even more smoking, and ... just perfect.
4. On Ian Condry's Hip-Hop Japan: Rap and the paths of cultural globallization is not as thrilling as it ought to be. His primary assertion is that, in the genba (club) scene of hip-hop in japan the division between globalization/localization breaks down - there is no binary relationship. Instead constant negotiations between the "global" world of music that includes American rap and the concerns of the Japanese rappers (be they historical, social, identity politics, etc) create an environment that is simultaneously "globalized" and "localized". Unfortunately, thus far, he has spent so much time reiterating this point that I'm tired of reading it. His ethnography is sound. His close reading of some of the lyrics is very good, but at other times quite uneaven. He tends to make a point, and then cite examples (either experiential or lyrical), but instead of explaining how those examples prove his point he assumes their significance is transparent. It's quite frustrating. Finally his alternative (thus far) to the "global/local" labels is "genba globalization" -- that there's something both particular/local as well as global in all global processes. I'm comfortable with that, but I wish that he said it in a clearer (and more concise) manner. I realize it's hard (very) to write a book, but since this book has been put together via chapters that he presented as papers elsewhere, sometimes he covers the same ground (particularly in his questioning of the global/local binary) over, more than once, within each chapter. I will, however, perservere.
5. the to do list thus far....
- finish Hip-Hop Japan
- read Marilyn Ivy
- read Freud's Unconscious
- do giles_fic_rec
- read Gharam article for Asian Horror
- laundry
- start reading for the paper
- review Japanese grammar patterns
- write response paper on Hip Hop Japan
- write (and post to blackboard) "presentation" paper on Tetsuo
2. thursday was the day of fabulous women mentors - Dar and I were talking about it in the car on the way back home and I've been blessed in my life with amazing women who have guided (and continue) to guide and mentor me. My mom, for one, the strongest woman I know. My stepmom, who's probably the second as far as that goes. My first real "boss" Sara at HUC, who taught me how to do things methodically, and how to be kindof human sometimes. My first real mentor/boss Paula at FTM, who was so awesome in so many ways, and even though she was a micromanager, too, she knew how to back off once I did things the way she wanted and needed - she was the first one that showed me managing is a series of calculations and risks you have to be willing to make. And now I've got these two phenominal women professors who are not only part of my academic environment, but who are on my side in all of the best intellectual ways. My advisor is fiercely inteligent and amazing and ... keeps me in line, so all of my crazy emotional engagements in text become logical, proved, canny and savy observations. And now I've got my asian horror film prof who not only heard what I wanted to work on, but fiured out HOW i was going to do that. This is the moment, I think, the turning point moment, when I really start to move from being a kind of generalist to actual scholarship, and I am so fantastically lucky to have these women as my means of support (and seriously, they shouldn't be in texas - one is from berkely and the other's from georgetown of all places... they should NOT be wasting their talents here.... except for the happy luck that i'm here and get to be inspired by them)
3. last night was delightful and fantastic - celebrated mrtwstedwhsprs' birthday last night at the only goth club in town. There was dancing, grinning, much talking, even more smoking, and ... just perfect.
4. On Ian Condry's Hip-Hop Japan: Rap and the paths of cultural globallization is not as thrilling as it ought to be. His primary assertion is that, in the genba (club) scene of hip-hop in japan the division between globalization/localization breaks down - there is no binary relationship. Instead constant negotiations between the "global" world of music that includes American rap and the concerns of the Japanese rappers (be they historical, social, identity politics, etc) create an environment that is simultaneously "globalized" and "localized". Unfortunately, thus far, he has spent so much time reiterating this point that I'm tired of reading it. His ethnography is sound. His close reading of some of the lyrics is very good, but at other times quite uneaven. He tends to make a point, and then cite examples (either experiential or lyrical), but instead of explaining how those examples prove his point he assumes their significance is transparent. It's quite frustrating. Finally his alternative (thus far) to the "global/local" labels is "genba globalization" -- that there's something both particular/local as well as global in all global processes. I'm comfortable with that, but I wish that he said it in a clearer (and more concise) manner. I realize it's hard (very) to write a book, but since this book has been put together via chapters that he presented as papers elsewhere, sometimes he covers the same ground (particularly in his questioning of the global/local binary) over, more than once, within each chapter. I will, however, perservere.
5. the to do list thus far....
- finish Hip-Hop Japan
- read Marilyn Ivy
- read Freud's Unconscious
- do giles_fic_rec
- read Gharam article for Asian Horror
- laundry
- start reading for the paper
- review Japanese grammar patterns
- write response paper on Hip Hop Japan
- write (and post to blackboard) "presentation" paper on Tetsuo