I Got the Good Stuff

I don't blog about music, normally (well, I often meta-blog on music, but rarely on actual albums) because there are much more qualified and enlightened individuals than I already doing so. To that end, I recommend earfuzz.com and soul-sides.com, both of which break_it_down for all of you jazz, funk, soul and 'world'-heads.

I had to share today, though, because I just received the soul compilation from soul-sides.com, and it's that rare compilation that continuously widens your eyes as yet another killer track comes on...you know, that rare comp with no filler tracks. Just the most beautiful soul sliding straight from your speakers to your ear, leaving a lingering 'ah' on your lips.

It makes me sad that the bigger outfits pushing out comp after comp do not share the discerning tastes of the master craftsman for this album, Mr. Oliver Wang.

Two more comps which have really flipped me lately are Brown Sugar and Freakoff--both are latin boogaloo compilations, a genre which has somehow mysteriously slipped into obscurity. It's a combination/infusion of soul and funk into the pulsing rhythms from Latin America, and mixed in the streets of Harlem circa 1970-1980. Gorgeous stuff.

The New Dissertation Topic

I admit it: I'm pretty jazzed about this topic, and, perhaps most importantly, so is my advisor. To set it all up for you--to let you feel the jazz--I explain a few things first:

1) I was a cultural anthro major as an undergrad, and grew quite interested in economic development--more for damage control vis-a-vis the World Bank--and thus picked up economics as my second major. I worked as a research assistant for a famous-y anthro professor who ran economic experiments in Africa, US cities and US rural areas.

2) In the anthro classes, we reveled in poking fun at the economics/business/development folk who claimed that the backwards cultures of Africans prohibited their economic success. Many an anthropologist's study proved that these backward cultures were usually rational behaviors given the different environment or context in which they lived. For instance, the very ornate and 'religious' ceremonies directing Bali's irrigation system (The famous Water Temples) were actually not religious schmreligious hullaballoo, but rather a finely tuned and intricate system which had taken into account a vast array of parameters, such as the different insects to be restrained, the different crops to be yielded, etc. Though they may have taken on religious language (a "high priest" who directed the water, the "temples", etc), they were actually amazingly efficient at maximizing crop yeild given all of these various parameters. The Green Scientists then came in with the mission of "modernizing" the temples in accordance with Western farming practices--the crops were ruined, fishies died, and took a few farmers with them. The Green Scientists just hadn't taken into account the different environment--the different physical environment--in which this farming was to take place.


3) People look at Iraq or Africa today and scratch their heads about why people would choose to vote down ethnic lines. It is generally assumed that these regions will always vote down ethnic lines because it is in their culture to 'stick' to their own, so to speak. The first gross misgeneralization of Iraq is that Saddam only gave pork or goodies/jobs to his Sunni compatriots; in fact, Saddam was more interested in giving stuffs to members of his tribe, which, of course, happened to be more Sunni than Shia or Kurdish. However, if one drew out the Iraqi geneology chart, one would see that the amount of stuffs given to an Iraqi citizen depended on the number of genes shared with their leader.

4) People use heuristics when making decisions; that is, you use an information shortcut. This is why many Americans vote down party lines; it lowers the cost of gathering information about candidate platforms. It's a rough measure of a candidate's actual preferences, but (and especially in polarized times such as these) it seems to work well enough given the 'stakes' of choosing one's House member.

4) Rural Africa is a low-information environment. That is, there is not free and easy access to newspapers, television news, etc. For many weeks in the rainy season, there may be little to no contact with the surrounding areas, as the roads are easily flooded and many areas operate without electricity (low infrastructure capacity). One heuristic which is easily attainable at the voting booth is the candidate's ethnicity. This is a heuristic which is used in America to some degree (it's called voting on descriptive characteristics--"I'm black, so I will vote for a black person if one is running." "I'm a woman, so I will vote for a woman if one is running.")

5) In early America, there was no choice for descriptive characteristics--to be a landowner (and thus to be eligible to both vote and run for office), one was going to be white and male. Most likely, you were also going to be British, so you can't use a last name to help narrow down your choice. When voting rights were extended to other groups (first black males, then women, etc), the political elite were still, by and large, constrained to the same homogenous set of faces (male and white). So, even though you had other groups voting, they were still little able to use descriptive voting to make their choices. So, the heuristic remained party label, or actual party platform.

6) In Africa, upon decolonization and in those nations that chose democracy, you have candidates for all ethnic groups and voters from all groups. Without pre-existing parties to absorb a mix of different groups or to provide an information shortcut to individuals, ethnicity becomes a quick and ready heuristic at the voting booth. Elites (candidates and politicians) then begin to form their platforms on this basis (feedback effect).

So, my dissertation will be this (the above stuffs) and also experiments run in Africa (most likely, though comparison experiments in Latin America or the Middle East may be appropriate, as well). Specifically, I hope to examine the effect of low information or high information on ethnic voting, as well as the effect of ethnic voting (if you're Yoruba and vote Yoruba in Nigeria, do you get more stuff if your guy wins? What if your ethnic group has no chance of procuring a majority? Do you 'absorb' into another group forming a tacit coalition government?)

So, yeah...Jazzed as hell.

I'M GOING TO GET TO TRAVEL AND STUDY SOMETHING INTERESTING! DOES IT GET ANY BETTER????

It's Time for Marshmallows.

Do you remember eating sugary cereals with marshamallows as a kid? I believe there had to be three strategies when consuming your Lucky Charms:
1) Eat all the marshamallows first, then slog through the actual "cereal" part.
2) Ration your marshamallows throughout so that every bite has a treasure.
3) Save your marshmallows for the end, so that you can leave the table on a glorious high-note with five spoonfuls of marshmallow magic.

Although option 2 prevailed occasionally, I was a 'saver'. I just couldn't bear the thought that I would have to finish off a colorless cereal at the end, so I suffered through the plain cereal up front.

Oh, but where are you going with this, Slick?

The topic preoccupying much of my brain's time these days is what to do with myself...how to make a living, so to speak. I'm currently the proud owner of quite an impressive amount of student loans--I won't give you a number, but I will tell you that most game show contestants win less than I owe. (So professional game show contestant is out for my job). This has, understandably, narrowed my options for the next few years, at least. Yes, I'm still on track to become a professor, but to be honest with you all out there in blogland, there's an awful lot of bullshit in academia. Yes, I know there's a lot of bullshit elsewhere, too, but the size of the egos with whom I have to work, not to mention the seemingly high rate of mental illness among the senior faculty, combined with the high stress level and lack of an official 'off-time' or holiday really up the bullshit stakes. Further, when I go for my first job in a year or two, the chances are really excellent that my choices will be Kansas, Nebraska or Kentucky (or some such other exciting locale). I was willing to do this for a very long time---eat the plain cereal for a few years, and then move to Marshmallow Land (tenured position in academia, preferrably, a city). I'll travel later, I tell myself, because I'm poor right now, but one day, I'll cruise the world on my paid year-long sabbatical. Of course, Ibiza at 40 is probably not quite the same as Ibiza at 21, but goddamn, those marshmallows will taste good later. I'll accept the offer at UCSD rather than NYU because SD has the better program---of course I would have preferred NYC to SD twice every day and three times on Sunday, but that's like...sixteen bites of plain cereal---so that's at least 5 bites of marshmallows later, right? I'll study something a little less interesting because it will get me a better job--and move me one space closer to the mallows; I'll get my piano compositions down later--I actually turned down a full free ride to a music conservatory thinking that I could compose all I wanted once I was retired.

I'll live later, once I've pre-paid for all of my fun.

Perhaps this was a wise strategy once upon a time, but I'm really friggin' sick of eating plain cereal. But once I leave this track, there's no hopping back on; I can't leave academia for a few months or years and 'figure out' if this is what I want to do. Sure, I could have done that after college, but now it's too late--I'm too far down the path to 'go find myself in Europe' before committing firmly--or rejecting outright--this future.

Sadly, to get tenure, once must basically live a monastic existence, full only of papers and lectures and conferences, oh my! So I'm not just around the corner...I'm just getting onto the street. And I just can't reconcile myself to the fact that I should wait another 8 years before getting to live.

So yeah, I really really really want some sugar.

Now.

my deep thought for the day

I have a cold, and it occurred to me, the amount of sex in my voice is inversely proportional to the amount of sex in my pants.

just thought I'd share.

My List

Ttractor wrote down her list of fears, rational or otherwise...my list was too long to post in her comments section, so here you are:

1. Everyone will find out that I have a great vocabulary but very little actual substance.
2. I will end up just as crazy and alone as my mother.
3. Deep down, I am just as religious as my father.
4. My longest relationship will continue to have been my first *real* relationship with my college boyfriend. Who is now gay.
5. I can't find happiness because I'm more comfortable being miserable.
6. All of my perceived personal growth is really just a sham constructed of cliches and wallpapered with to-do lists.
7. No matter how hard I exercise, I will always be the possessor of huge, muscular, man-like legs.
8. I really am big-boned.
9. No one would care if I died.
10. People would care that I died, but never took the time to tell me when I was alive.
11. Dying in the middle of sex so that my father would know with certainty that I am no longer a virgin.
12. Living a life never having loved another the way I know I could, never being loved the way I know I should.
13. Similar to ttractor and her thai delivery men, I pretend to talk to someone in my empty apartment while ordering so that the pizza delivery men do not think I am ordering a large pizza for only myself.
14. When I come home every day, I wake my dog up from his sleep immediately because I am afraid he is dead. He is just old and tired. So far.
15. I will miss the shuttle by one minute and have to wait for half an hour for the next one to come. I end up arriving 15 minutes early every day.
16. I am going to fail in academia.
17. I am going to succeed in academia.
18. I am going to stay in academia.
19. I am going to leave academia.
19. I will write a book which will be read by exactly four other academics who study the exact same thing.
20. My life's work won't help one other person.
21. My credit card and student loan debt will never be erased.
22. None of my friends actually like me; but rather, feel sorry for me.
23. People say horrible things about me when I am not around.
24. These horrible things are true.
25. It wasn't their fault it didn't work out, it was mine.
26. My relationship with my dog will be the longest and most stable relationship I ever have with another male who is not my father.
27. My laugh is annoying to others.
28. It really was my fault.
29. I look like a writhing white whale when I dance.
30. No one has ever had a secret crush on me.
31. I will never get to travel the world.
32. I won't live up to my potential.
33. I never really had any potential.
34. I am increasingly becoming a socially awkward hermit crab who will one day be the crazy cat lady. but with dogs.
35. nope. with cats.
36. My perfume/smokey smell bothers people just as much as their cologne/hairspray/nail polish/perfume bothers me.
37. I am one dentist's visit away from a complete set of dentures.
38. I will never exist in reality as I do in my fantasies.
39. I really do look like that (pointing at pictures of myself in my head).
40. The Mayans were right and the Apocalypse is coming when I am 32 years old.
41. That economics guy my friend talked to was right and we're headed for a major depression.
42. That homeless guy was right and there really are people bugging us, watching us, plotting.
43. Schizophrenics aren't crazy, they just see and hear better.
44. I am not as cool as my friends.
45. My friends know this.
46. I am condescending and mean.
47. There's a reason they didn't like me in high school.
48. No one will ever be completely honest with me.
49. If they were, I'd never trust them.
50. People think I'm much smarter than I am.
51. People think I"m much dumber than I am.
52. People don't think about me at all.
53. I don't really get it at all.
54. I will wake up one day and find that 300 spider babies have hatched and are coming to me for their first meal.
55. Moths do bite, and I will provide proof of this with my swollen limbs.
56. Insects take note when you kill one of their kin and come back for revenge.
57. I will pass out and die because I had to go see a scary movie drunk.
58. I will never stop editing and adding to this list.