Monthly Archives: April 2009

Song #3 for last day of class

I play music for my students while they fill out evals. In honor of the fact that, in the end, I don’t know squat about the lives of 20-something women, I like to include something that I find inexplicable that the kids are listening to. So, natch, Avril Lavigne’s Girlfriend: Avril Lavigne – Girlfriend (Radio […]

Song #2 from last day of class

I give students music for evals. Here’s number 2, from Sigur Ros (It translates to ‘Within me a Lunatic Sings):

Last day of class, part one

I always give my students music to listen to while filling out evaluations. Here’s on tap for today: This song is from this album, incidentally. If you don’t feel like dancing, you can always relax and let Buddha take you away. Highlights: at the 2:54 mark, you can see the highest guy in the place […]

Frankie Manning

Frankie Manning died yesterday, April 27th. He was a month shy of his 95th birthday. There were (and are) celebrations planned, which will now become memorials. My partner and I started taking swing lessons a good 7-8 years ago, and we’ve probably taken a few workshops a year since then. We go dancing occasionally (a […]

Depressing NYT, Refreshing Theses

Here’s a screenshot of the NYT right this moment: Somehow the combination of Maude’s death, the impending flu epidemic (if not now, soon), continued immigration sadness, the professor suspected in shooting, Iraq still slow-disintegrating, and the incredibly depressing potential re-rise of the monied financial classes. It makes me want to just throw up my hands […]

I know the future

It’s true. Partner and I saw This American Life, simulcast at a movie theater from NYU. The show will air in a couple weeks, I think. The theme was “Return to the Scene of the Crime”, and the highlights (IMHO) were Dan Savage’s tear-inducing story about his lapsed Catholicism, and Joss Whedon’s performance of a […]

more aggrevaluation

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Speaking of reviews and recommendations

In another frame of mind, I would say that some crowd-sourced reviews do make me happy. ‘Skip S’ reviews Animal Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavilion on iTunes: Okay. Imagine sitting back in the day with none other than the Buddha himself. The two of you are discussing life, love, and various other zen things. Then, all […]

Aggregation aggravation

It seems to me that one of the fundamental advances and problems with web 2.0 is that it poses expertise against aggregation. The ‘old’ system (and here I would say that these are overlapping, not coterminous ways of doing things) is one of expert reviews, or critics. You want to know what movie to see, […]

frauds?

A little information needed, please. How many of you at one point or another were paralyzed from writing and/or posting something on account of feeling like a total fraud? Does having a blog change this, or exacerbate it?