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September 27, 2006
CALL FOR PAPERS: The 2007 Pop Conference at Experience Music Project
Waking Up From History: Music, Time, and Place April 19-22, 2007 Seattle, Washington Music happens, then it ripples. What is the relationship between the circumstances that produce music and our swirling notions of pop's past, future, and zeitgeist? How do the times affect the notes? What factors literally and figuratively change the beat of a city? Some decry postmodern "pastiche," while others defend pop concoctions as multiculturalism in action or intoxicating aesthetics. But what are the power relationships at work when music stops time and lets us dance in place? For this year's Pop Conference, we invite presentations on music, time, and place. This might include: *Reading time and place into musical innovation. The breakbeat as a refunking of sonic structure and origin myth; or the social history of changing time signatures. * The racial, class, and gender components that constitute a pop place or time's "we"; the mutating New Orleans of the hip-hop, funk, R&B, and jazz eras, for example. *Evolving notions of musical revivalism: retro culture, questions of periodization in music, and the validity of the concept of youth culture as a sign of the times. *Geographies of sound, or how place is incorporated sonically. Lise Waxer called Cali, Colombia, an unlikely bastion of salsa revivalism, a "city of musical memory." *The dematerialization of the album into the celestial jukebox and other new media. Does the Chicken Noodle Soup dance live on 119 and Lex or on Youtube? *How dichotomies of nearness/experience and farness/history affect music fanship, music writing, and music making. *The "place" of pop now, culturally, professionally, and certainly politically. Proposals should be sent to Eric Weisbard at EricW@emplive.org by December 15, 2006. For individual presentations, please keep proposals to roughly 250 words and attach a brief (75 word) bio. Full panel proposals and more unusual approaches are also welcome. For further guidance, contact the organizer or program committee members: Jalylah Burrell (New York University), Jon Caramanica (Vibe), Daphne Carr (series editor, Da Capo Best Music Writing), Jeff Chang (author, Can't Stop Won't Stop), Michelle Habell-Pallán (University of Washington), Josh Kun (University of Southern California) Eric Lott (University of Virginia), Ann Powers (Los Angeles Times), Simon Reynolds (author, Rip it Up and Start Again), Bob Santelli (author, The Big Book of Blues), and Judy Tsou (University of Washington). We are excited to announce that presentations from this year's conference will be considered for a future issue of The Believer. The Pop Conference connects academics, critics, musicians, and other writers passionate about talking music. Our second anthology, Listen Again: A Momentary History of Pop Music, will be published by Duke in 2007. The conference is sponsored by the Seattle Partnership for American Popular Music (Experience Music Project, the University of Washington School of Music, and radio station KEXP 90.7 FM), through a grant from the Allen Foundation for Music. For more information, go to http://www.emplive.org/education/index.asp and click on "Pop Conference."
September 22, 2006
September 17, 2006
September 13, 2006
Let's Reviewing
Some recent reviews for City Pages: J. Dilla, Band of Horses, and Noxagt. ~ Here's a picture of my little nephew Eli with my sister Lauren* and my mom:  * New member of the "blogosphere"
September 05, 2006
Model One, Simply
  L-R: Henry Kloss, engineer/inventor; J. Niimi, asthmatic So I turned 36 yesterday. I've now entered my late mid-30s! But, it wasn't such a bad day after all. The familial unit and I had a sumptuous Italian repast up in River North, and my little nephew came to dinner in public with all of us for the first time. (The photos of the little critter will comprise an upcoming post, once my sister sends them to me.) In recent years, when my family asks what I might be interested in gift-wise for special occasions (such as a birthday), I've started e-mailing them my Amazon wish list. Now, you might think that what this tactic gains in convenience and peace-of-mind for everyone involved, it must also lose in spontaneity and surprise. But actually (as my wife pointed out to me tonight), whenever my kin buy some weird crap off my wish list that they know absolutely nothing about and then wrap it up and give it to me, without exception I am always stunned. Because at this point my list is so huge that, for the most part, I don't even know what the fuck's on there anymore. And so it seems like scary ESP when I unwrap a gift from my Mom and it's the Fall's Complete Peel Sessions box set, or the way out-of-print Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons 25th Anniversary collection, even if later on I seem to remember having rated both as 'Must Haves' on the wish list's item priority scale. Or, in another example from earlier tonight, when my sister gets me vol. 1 of Writers on Writing: Collected Essays from the New York Times, and I'm like, man!, I just bought vol. 2 not a week ago! WTF? But I have to say that I was truly surprised to the point of flabbergastion when we arrived back home a while later, in al dente/EVOO comas, and the wifey presented me with a certain special gift. Behold the Tivoli Audio Model One.  I've been wanting one of these suckers ever since they came out, with that clean minimal look and economy of design: a single mono speaker, two knobs (AM-FM-AUX and volume), and a smoothly gliding 5:1 ratio tuner (no EQ). There's an LED whose yellowish glow guides you in locking a station in. The small, handmade wooden cabinet is also acoustically designed to be a speaker enclosure (the unit stands on rubber feet and has a bass port underneath.) The wife got me the sleek black model, which kind of resembles an Eames-designed police transmitter:  This thing sounds as sweet as a miracle -- the puny little cone has the rich, detailed presence of a high-end component system run thru some very nimble speakers. Part of the reason I wanted a Model One was to be able to listen to jPod while washing the dishes, which the AUX input facilitates. Just catching a glimpse of this thing sitting on the table every time I walk into the kitchen makes me feel 35% more European and 25 lbs. lighter. (Read about Henry Kloss, and his innovative use of MESFET transistor technology in the Model One, previously only utilized in microwave communications and radar.) ~ POSTSCRIPT, 9/6/05: I received a package in the mail yesterday, and inside was a copy of the Strangers With Candy complete series DVD set, accompanied by the following note: 
September 03, 2006
That Book Shit, My Joint
Whenever I'm not sleeping (which is most of the time these days), I'm either at the PC writing, at the PC reading, on the couch reading, or at the PC looking for more books to read on the couch. So when I find time to relax, it's understandable that I want to spend it futzing around with statistical data on what I've read and what I intend to read. I want to use the Internet for this as well. That's why I'm addicted to LibraryThing. I normally detest the term, but LibraryThing is truly a "guilty pleasure." For normal people, this means REO Speedwagon or Reece's ice cream or bad '80s buddy-cop movies. But at least that shit is entertaining in a benign, noncommital, gestalt way. LibraryThing is guilt: an online database of your book collection that you spend hours compiling for the sole purpose of comparing your reading tastes to that of strangers. What a beautifully engineered waste of time. It's the OCLC of anonymous book geeks. (In fact, its cross-referencing functions even utilize MARC cataloging protocol.) But beyond the four-eyes bookworm trappings, there are plenty of the usual MySpace/Friendster social networking kicks in play (you can find out who else owns a favorite obscure book of yours, and then peep what else is in their "holdings"; you can see statistics about whose book collections have the most overlap with yours, and wonder how similar to you they might be, and whether you might enjoy chatting with them over a beer.) Without some such frisson of voyeurism and fantasy (the Internet's dopamine), a concept like this would be dead in the water. Especially since LibraryThing users, I'd wager, probably get laid on average a lot less than your typical body-modified, midriffin' MySpace habitue. Not because the eggheads simply prefer to quietly curl up with a book in their leisure time, but because most of them are married. Of course, it didn't take long for me to wonder how different this would be from a similarly structured site for avid record collectors. One big difference would be that, as snobby and materialist as collector scum can be, a "VinylThing" website would actually be less about broadcasting consumer identity than LibraryThing's heavy "I am what I read" vibe. VinylThing would be straight object fetishism ("I want this record for what it is, not for what I am"); LibraryThing exudes something closer to the teenage cultural-product-as-identity-signifier thing that, in a parallel context, might manifest itself in rock band hoodies and emo eyewear. Visit my LibraryThing page! www.librarything.com/catalog/jniimi. That organizational psychology text speaks poetry with the language of my heart.
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