Humanities are Crap

Because I signed up to attend a lecture a while ago I got the following email about an upcoming even that I find ridiculous:

Faculty and graduate students interested in digital literacy are warmly invited to an upcoming talk by Professor Jonathan Alexander, University of California-Irvine, whose work focuses on digital media and queer theory.

Please forward this message to interested faculty and graduate students

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Professor Joonathan Alexander will speak on "Jean Cocteau, Queerness, Multimedia" In this presentation, he will explore the representation of queerness through multimedia and asks the following questions,

• What does multimedia offer us in the figuring of queerness? how might we compose a multimediated queerness?

• What/where/how is the queer[ed] body figured in/through multimedia?

• What are the limits of the knowable and knowably queer in multimediated spaces?

This presentation reflects on such questions by bringing together theoretical musing, analysis of the work of Jean Cocteau, and digital performance art.


I think there are certain signifiers that indicate when a talk will be almost entirely bullshit: dropping names of European 'thinkers', coining unnecessary new words, overuse of uncommon punctuation, referring to any unspecified 'theory', and finally any invocation of performance art.

Recent Ear Candy

I've bought a few albums recently, and borrowed some other great ones from the public library. As you may have guessed from other posts, I've got the Vampire Weekend album and British Sea Power's Do You Like Rock Music?, and in addition the Magnetic Fields' Distortion and the Juno soundtrack. All of these I've been passing out to friends.

Through the library I've caught up on some great femals singer-songwriters like KT Tunstall, Regina Spektor and Feist, and some older alt-country groups like the Old 97s, Whiskeytown, and Grandaddy. And then indie favorites Andrew Bird and Gomez.

Big Heads and Vampires

Last week I went to two concerts in a row, the first on Wednesday to see Big Head Todd and the Monsters, and the second was Vampire Weekend on Valentine's Day. These concerts were a welcome relief after a lot of shows I was interested in seeing were cancelled, postponed, or bypassed Columbus (Marah, Indigo Girls and Super Furry Animals).

As one of the other concert-goers said at the start of the BHTatM show, "Welcome to 1993!" The only album of theirs I have and know is Sister Sweetly, from that year. Although I encountered it much later, on a camping trip during my sophomore year of college. For a six hour van trip, it was the only cassette tape we had to listen to. This album had the song "Bittersweet" on it, and they played it midway through the concert. There is something in the simple definition of bittersweet that I find so terribly worse than misery, and I sat there crying in the audience. I left soon afterwards. Anyway, BHTatM really impressed me; did you knotheir websitew that were commissioned to write a song for NASAs astronauts? and that you can download their newest album for free from their website?

Standing in opposition to BHTatM, Vampire Weekend is the newest, hottest thing in alternative rock- their first, eponymous, album is less than a month old. Lots has been written about them, by far better music bloggers out there, so just give them a listen, on World Cafe for instance. Even Neil Gaiman appreciates their 'punctuation song' "Oxford Comma".