So people liked it! there was a lot more discussion after my paper than after the other guy's, although his presentation was fun because it involved him playing lots of excerpts of calypsos from the 1920s. There was one woman, after my talk, who apparently does a lot of work on intellectual property and third world development, and she TOTALLY got what I was talking about, about the non-commodity aspects of music. Of music-making as a culturally constitutive process. It was a friendly crowd anyway. Most of the people there are scholars of Caribbean music, so i didn't have to defend my topic's academic value, which really is what most of my energy went to for the thesis. But some folks seemed really interested, and several told me I should publish it, including the very nice woman who had invited me to give the talk in the first place. Even though I had already been thinking about publishing, it has an extra oomph coming from people who are already established academics. or even just critical listeners.

I was really nervous, but I don't think I did too badly. I did say um a lot. and my voice gets deeper, and if I'm not careful I go a bit monotone. Luckily my topic is something I've talked a lot about in conversation, so I am actually familiar with saying this stuff out loud. This gives me a little more chance to feel natural. At first I was disheartened by the first speaker a bit, because he had a huge organised handout for people to refer to, and spoke without notes. But basically he was just describing the handout. I was trying to raise a lot of really complicated issues, going from the national to the international, from the legal to the economic to the cultural and back. I was afraid it would be too confusing, or boring because it was more theoretical. But people said they found it interesting. whee!!

The crowd was a funny mix. The majority were older white people, evenly divided, gender-wise, some from the caribbean. there was one black man from Guyana, I think, with dreads, in his 40s maybe. A young white guy (american or canadian) who's an anthropology student at L. school of econ! And two black women in their thirties. One of the two black women was the woman who was rght there with me, or ahead of me, in talking about the interaction between international copyright laws and NGOs and their relation to local situations, she came up to me afterwards and was really positive about my work. She also had some suggestions for NGOs that are doing work on these issues, especially on issues of intellectual property and development - OXFAM, for example, is getting into this, because of the TRIPs agreement and the implications for seed varieties in India and Africa. wow. fascinating.

So now, more job stuff. And LDL is visiting in a week ! hooray!

Oct 13 00 on Israel, finally a piece of information that actually adds to my understanding, instead of just reiterating the caricatures of positions (or position). Just a little snippet about the historical and political significance of one of the sparks to all the madness: here

Saw O Brother Where Art Thou, earlier this evening. damn. call me a tool but Clooney just gets better looking. And here he is Clark Gable times TEN. A really funny flick. With some interesting overtones, and visual, as usual delicious (even when GC wasn't in the frame). One of the more interesting themes was the music. Much of it was real hillbilly bluegrass wailing, which is, despite what most people say, the other root of rocknroll. Of course blues is the one everyone talks about, but along with race, it's poorfolks music that has an edge, including poor white mountain folks. Called up all these memories of college in Ohio, when on Sunday i'd catch the bluegrass show on the radio, these incredible sweet harmonies, but with this raw-edged howl, and these polyrythmic banjo runs. polyrythms. that's right. from the appalachian mountains. It was really funny to see it with a german, in a room full of brits. Half the time nobody could understand the accents (which didn't necessarily sound mississippi to me, but more mountain-style). Thhey were thick accents. And poor QSC kept getting tripped up by the idioms. "bona fide?" he asked me, "what's bona fide?" (and in german, you put the accent on the second word and it always sounds funn --when describing the film i told him it had a sort of 1930s screwball comedy thing going on and he said "screwBALL? what is screw BALL?" hee.

Oct 12 00 Woke up earlier today. going to try to edge back my wake-up time. I still seem to mess about until 2am doing nothing much. But got up at 9:15 today, just so I could have a nice morning bath. Yesterday I was at the cafe I did my Sunday gig at, hangin out with a friend who works there. The owner is a nice guy. He was walking around the place holding his little daughter under one arm, she's just a baby. they look exactly alike. Both with a little scruff of blondish hair tufting into a point, and big round eyes that look suprised. Anyway as I was preparing to leave, he came over to the cabinet near me, to get sugar or something, and opened another drawer which was full of little bottles. I thought they were nips, you know, those tiny bottle of gin and whatever that winos buy with can-change, and he scooped up five or six and tossed them in my bag. They were bath oil, it turned out. 'refreshing' orange-geranium bath oil. The bottles are brownish glass, and look more like medicine up close. They have a dot-com name on them, so they must be promo items. nice. Tried one this morning. it was pretty good, not really oily, dissolved in the water okay, and the scent wasn't too heavy, just a tang of citrus. not too flowery either. I don't like to smell like flowers, i like to smell like food.

I've been trying to avoid the news about the situation in Israel, because it makes me so upset. But I keep getting snippets and my blood pressure just goes through the roof. I'm pretty much not into nationalism of any kind, so i just can't hang with the Israeli concept as it is usually argued. One of the reasons why I've avoided many self-identified Jewish groups. I think I wrote about this years ago, about this chat I had with an otherwise very nice women, where I was just saying that I thought the issues between Israel and Palestine were complex, because the nation of Israel came after people had already been living there. "but they were just tribes" she said. as if that justified anything. as if that MEANT anything. bitter echoes, too, of the US' own bloody settlers. Anyway, in the recent days, the fact that many are still calling on Arafat to control his people, as if every palestinian is somehow a member of some organised group, while ignoring the fact that those who are violent on the Israeli side are soldiers, who presumably can be controlled, since that's the goddam definition of a soldier, someone who takes orders. The arrogance of that first soldier, who poked his gun out from behind the plastic shield which was protecting him from stones, and shot back. Why shoot? why? it makes me crazy. it does. still following the news. have to say the tone around it all seems slightly less pro-israel than usual. And the involvement of the Israeli Arabs is new as well. Of course there's idiocy in the media on both sides. An email making the rounds, which a friend of mine (whom I suspect of being super-pro-israel so I'm scared to raise it), details how the New York Times misidentified a picture of a frightened teenage boy and an Israeli soldier as a soldier grabbing a Palestinian, when actually the boy was an Israeli whom the soldier was taking to safety. The boy was identified by his parents and uncle in a letter to the newspaper. But then the email goes on to say how this shows the typical pro-palestine bias on the media. And I feel my stomach begin to ache. what planet are they on, where conceding humanity, and a point of view, is considered a bias? let alone the idea that when one side has missiles, rockets, tanks, and guns, PLUS nuclear weapons, while the other side doesn't, that something more complex is going on? Actually, Israel has been holding most of the middle east hostage with the threat of nuclear weapons for years. oh i can't go on ranting, because I've said it all before, and these events just bring it all back like bile in my throat.

Oct 11 00 LDL is coming. bought a ticket, arrives on the 24th of this month. how will I get through those two weeks? wish it was now.
just woke up. sleeping too late these days. till 10am, normally. lazy me. up till one or two, though. Had long involved violent dream this morning. About a school, and hostages, and long corridors with narrow moving sidewalks and escalators. Being chased and chasing. I held a man hostage with a scalpel, but I was just going along with the crazy girl until I could figure out how to get away. at one point, chased by a thing, a machine, a small machine, like the bottom (chopping) part of a lawnmower. it clattered after us, and somehow could communicate. It told me that the crazy girl had altered people's GPA's and so she had to die. or something. very strange.
The rest of this week is dedicated to writing my presentation, which I have to give at the Institute for Commonwealth Studies next monday. my fist academic conference. hooraw.

Oct 8 00 -- only two more days to download my 2-hour web broadcast from a weekplus ago! slammin tunes to take up crucial disc space (see above NEW section for the link)-- Saturday night slid through clammy night streets to The Blue Angel, where there's no Dietrich, no torch-singing, but instead Rocksteady, Dub, Reggae, Ska, Dancehall and a little soul; a ton of enthusiastic mostly-studenty people, and almost no air conditoining. Ran into the terrific dancer who I had met before. I feel bad, because I wasn't so impressed with him in conversation, but I love dancing with him, and would like to keep dancing with him. Is that so wrong? He wants to hang out, and I don't mind I guess, but I'm not so enthusiastic about it. Just keep showing up at The Angel, guy, so we can get down get down.
All loooopy today because all I've done is play records. Got home last night at 3am, staggered around for a bit planning out my gig for Sunday afternoon, playing at a cafe for five hours. five. I took probably 2/3 of my records and played almost all of them. Woke up, had a bath, called a cab, went to the venue, played until 6pm, called a cab, sat around and had coffee with some friends, and came home. my whole awareness disappeared into the music for long stretches of time, though. except for the backache, it didn't seem so long. And folks came by to see me, which was nice. Especially the lovely heyoka and snarl, who I haven't seen in too too long. Unfortunately I had to keep an eye on the decks so there wasn't much chatting for me. But a look and a smile, and also watching people respond to my tunes, that was good fun. Started out with a lot of dub and tunes of these three fantastic rocksteady compilations I bought. Shoring up the collection, filling out some edges.

Oct 6 00 Last week was the first presidential debate, and it was held at my old workplace, my mother's workplace, the school that I took classes at. The whole setup stank from the start. The University is a small commuter school, a working-class place, a state school. The biggest draw for the organisers of the debate, I'm sure, was that it's on a peninsula, and thus, in this new era of large and excitable protests, access could be easily controlled. And was it ever. The Entire School was closed down for two days, classes cancelled and everything. No recompense was made to the students who lost class time (and they can ill afford it, most of them having families and jobs and responsibilities and likewise inflexible schedules). That would NEVER HAPPEN at Harvard, let me tell you. Nobody would stand for it. But a money-poor, prestige-poor university, they can just suck it the fuck up, I guess. And none of the money paid to the school is going to infrastructure of any kind (and I can vouch for the fact that it is physically falling apart, while funding falls). Meanwhile, as they are planning the debate, on Carson Beach, just south of the school, bodies are being unearthed by the Feds, bodies put there by Whitey Bulger, local mafiosi on the run from the Feds for the past several years, also BROTHER of the President of the University where the debate is being held. Ah, Boston.

So my sweetheart volunteered to be a street medic for the protests. Apparently street medics came out of the Northwest, when some EMTs in Colorado decided to quit their jobs and follow protests around to try and patch up people being brutalised by the police. (of course one of the few of their number to be arrested was so in Philly while he was patching up a police officer, but you know the cops, any action must be bad action). Anyway, the protests were being held in Boston the day before, and on the main road leading to the school on the day of and hopefully during the debate. As far as I can tell, issues aired included protests on the way the debate itself landed on the school, but far more were protesting about the issues that the debaters would not cover, the exclusion of Ralph Nader, a legitimate candidate, and the sham that is the two-party system. There was also an anti death penalty march, and a march in solidarity with Palestine. A great emphasis seems to have been on the corporate-dominated platforms of both canmdidates. I have varying levels of sympathy with some of the issues, I would probably have been with LDL, as a street medic, wiping off pepper spray and carrying people to safer places. I was impressed with how it was organised ahead of time. In execution, the marches and protests seemed to have been a mixed bag, but they still make me hopeful. The Boston Independent Media Center gives a pretty good sense of the issues and problems. The main thing which still needs to be dealt with is the hostility between some of the unionists and some of the protesters. Still saddening to see, makes me feel very conflicted. Because I don't trust a movement that denigrates the people who make daily life possible, who build and drive and answer phones and are most union members. Even though all those systems are intertwined with exploitation, the people involved in them cannot always afford to turn their backs. I don't know where you have to stand to feel you can tell someone to turn their backs on their jobs, on their immediate obligations. At the same time, people can be short-circuited to instant gratification, to accepting some material gain at the expense of others, and at the expense of questioning the system that sets it up that way. I want to change that. But how?

The night of the events, I curled up in bed with my laptop, because they had five-minute updates at the IMC site, on what was happening. Especially considering that LDL was the only black medic, in a reputedly mostly-caucasian crowd, I was worried about him being a target. Boston cops are pretty racist. So I threw a blanket over me, and read internet porn (text only), alternating it with oneliners on pepper spray and horses (that's the not-porn stuff). yes, a strange juxtaposition. but it all kept my mind on my love. And I feel proud. I couldn't be there, but he was. He quit his job which was eating his spirit, and immediately volunteered to be a support, to be political and not-slogany. I didn't know how to say it to him, but I finally stammered it out, because he's been so unhappy with his situation in Boston, much of it feels like a waste of time. And his first step away from that was such a good omen. And his next step is to me. He's coming soon.

Oct 5 00 just watched two documentaries. the last on the ahnernebe, the nazi archaeology and science unit. The tone of the documentary was a little off-putting, mostly because they chose the fetishizing of the myth of the holygrail as the theme. But the hints at stories, about the various archaeologists and scientists who made all these expeditions to shore up this fantasy of their aryan past. The awful resonance of this young bearded german making a rubber mold of a tibetan man, both all smiles, and the letters about the need to procure masks and skulls of jews and delineating the procedure for getting them from auschwitz. There's a lot on the BBC about world war two, and they interview a lot of old nazis now, and it always makes my stomach hurt. This one woman, who'd been married to an SS officer, was all into the idea that judeo-christian religion had been forced on the germans, and they all really wanted to go backto their roots, which had something to do with runes etc. And then at the end she talks about how Hitler didn't want war, he wanted to bring the german peopel together. Reminded me of when I was 16, and met a wp-skin in northern California who said 'I'm not white power, I'm white pride.' fuck off, the lot of you. The really gratifying soundbite, though, was from an archaeologist who was talking about what happened to the profession after the war. Because evidently many of the ahnernebe people went on to have careers after the war, heading departments at universities (I wonder if it was more american ones or in germany and austria and such). The interviewed guy talked about how archaeology has been used in identity creation and manipulation, and said that the field after the war really failed to tackle the concept of ethnicity, and the fact, as he put it, that "ethnicity has no roots in pre-history."

this actually links to something that's been on my mind again recently, about authenticity. I still don't trust authenticity arguments. I prefer sincerity, which is admittedly more personal. I may write more on this later.. it's quite a thorny debate.

Another note from Paris, cuz i just realised I didn't post the notes on my favorite day: On Saturday, I started out with a trip to the Catacombs at 9:30 am. This is where I have most pictures from, because there was noone to disturb. Down down down the windey stairs, through dark corridors with gravel scrunching underfoot, and nobody around. I forgot it was morning almost at once. got spooked by the silence, and then by the sound of somebody coming. remembering a nightmare that was mostly the sound of squishing feet behind me. involuntary heart-race, a bit of quick breathing till the guy comes round the corner and I let him pass me so I can keep him in sight. Itgot damper the farther along I got. Till the part that you always hear about. the bones the bones. walls of bones with skulls set in, facing outward, in rows, with stacked legbones in between. Up to past my head. bonewalls wound out of sight round corners. And then plaques everywhere, in latin and french, all about death, the plaques were (dare i ssay it) overkill. not sure about the point of the inscriptions. I think more deep thought sabout mortality would have come fro the sight of bones unadorned,and the occasional info on what cemetary they came from. the dampness was truly creepy, the gravel shone and slid beneath, when looking up got you an eyeful of low uneven ceiling with fat clear drops glistening-growing, lengthening towards you much too slowly, and falling only every now and again, much less often than you'd expect. Came out blinking, and a man inspected my bag for stolen bits. I saw on the table a skull and tibia that someone had attempted to take with them. brown-grey dust covered my shoes and pantlegs, as I wandered back towards the metro in the sun I'd forgotten about.
in the brightness, I decided to buy a little food, and headed down Rue Da Guerre, still in the posh 7th Arrondissement. This tiny street was closed to traffic on a Saturday morning, and lines with cafes, fruitstands, cheeseshops and the like. There was a boookstore halfway down, the outside covered with images from Alice in Wonderland. On the way down the street, towards a hat store I'd read about, I heard the sound of an accordion. Squinting ahead, saw a person dressed as a big lion, dancing, and annother two, camel and parrot, also capering, their big fussy heads and sightless eyes nodding in tune to the accordionist, who was even amplified with a little speaker on a luggage cart. children were agog, frozen in that half-delight half-terror that grownups in big animal costumes seem to bring on. I felt it too, almost ominous, but cheerful, depending on the angle. Went into a fruit shop,, and came out to the sight of an oncoming brass marching band. They sang in spanish, they played "Guns of Navaronne," they drowned out the accordion, and as they passed he quit for a while, then began playing along. nobody seemed to know what it was all about, but it kept spirits up anyway.
Then got the metro up to menilmontant, walked, bought some fabric, headed towards Rue Oberkampf, a broad street with trees on either side. Coming down the street were some police motorcycles, blowing whistles, clearing the roadway, and then, a motorcycle rally passed. Over a hundred of them, revving and zooming. but it was a really parisian motorcycle rally: no black-leather bearded biker guys, no bright anime-style bikers, just a bunch of po-faced, preppy guys in blouson jackets. sorry but that's how it was.
Toook the metro back down to marais, more old buildings,and once a jewish section though you'd only know it by the plaques and engravings on the buildings and a few streetnames. posh shops have moved in, and going farther west takes you into the pink-franc section, or whatever they'd call it. Gay men's boutiques, everything very expensive, and quite gurl-hostile, by my experience anyway. Walked north past some museums and the archives when all of a sudden this strange sound rang out. broad and wavery and brassy, it echoed off the buildings. In harmony, but harsh, it came and went, some composition. I followed the noise to a fenced-in garden seemingly full of people. The fence was iron bars set in a low cement step-wall. I climbed up on the step, hanging onto the iron bars, and peered in, as did several other people. Inside, a standing crowd ina garden, with a low maze on the right, and a lawn, in the far right corner of which was a band of men with round horns without keys or anything to adjust the pitch. I don'tknwo what they're called. THey wrap around the shoulder, and funniest of all, the open mouth of the horn is at the back, so the men were all facing the corner, with their backs to the audience, blatting out this quavery-shiver of sound. Me and my fellow peerers-in hung on for a few tunes, one women tugging back at her dog who was much less interested. Then I headed back up town to eat.