Author: Ivan Kreilkamp

You can contact me at ivan812 AT gmail.com

Prof. Sha Na Na

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I have to say, Sha Na Na (stupidest band name ever?) is just about the last group whose members I would have expected to go into academia. Also, can I observe that Sha Na Na did not “make doo-wop avant-garde,” they just turned it into an irritating parody and paved the path for Happy Days and assorted other bogus 1950’s nostalgia. Pretty impressive academic careers, though:

[addendum: I am flabbergasted that — see comments below — a member of Sha Na Na actually read this posting and wrote me to explain how the band was named.  I feel like a snarky jerk.  What do I know?]

http://chronicle.com/weekly/v54/i40/40a00601.htm

From the issue dated June 13, 2008

From Rock ‘n’ Roll Stardom to Academe

By INGRID NORTON

How do you top the thrill of playing at Woodstock? By going to graduate school, of course.

Just ask the members of Sha Na Na, who were the penultimate act at the legendary 1969 rock festival, in the slot just before Jimi Hendrix. Of Sha Na Na’s 12 original members, eight went on to get advanced degrees. The musicians, who blended doo-wop choruses with blazing dance moves, formed from a Columbia University a cappella group in the late 60s….

“I don’t think I ever went to a rock concert till I was in a rock concert,” says Rob A. Leonard, a founding member and, today, a professor of linguistics at Hofstra University.

Sha Na Na was the brainchild of Rob Leonard’s brother, George, who was working on his Ph.D. George J. Leonard, now a professor of interdisciplinary humanities at San Francisco State University, wanted to revive 50s innocence through doo wop, making it avant-garde. …

“After that, my college experience was completely abnormal,” says Bruce C. Clarke, a professor of literature and science at Texas Tech University.

Members balanced lives as rock stars and students by taking classes that met in the middle of the week and touring on extended weekends. Rob Leonard, who would later do years of research in East Africa, originally took Swahili because it was the only introductory language class that didn’t meet on a Friday. Rich T. Joffe, who got a Ph.D. after leaving the group but is now an antitrust lawyer, remembers reading an introductory economics textbook on an airplane while the rest of his severely hung-over bandmates tried to sleep.

….Mr. Clarke put himself through his first few years of graduate school with money he’d saved from tours. Alan M. Cooper, now provost and a professor of Jewish studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary, wondered if he should go back to the band when he couldn’t find housing at Yale graduate school. ….All agree that Sha Na Na shaped them professionally. Mr. Cooper still relies on his performance instincts when he teaches.…

http://chronicle.com
Section: Short Subjects
Volume 54, Issue 40, Page A6

Paul Pierce, Willis Reed, and epic sports analogy

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Celtics star Paul Pierce falls to the ground in pain in the first game of the NBA finals, clutching his knee. He’s taken off the court in a wheelchair, and fans fear the worst. Less than two minutes later, he returns, quickly hits two three-pointers, and leads his team to victory.

Metaphor and analogy erupt. First, in their most histrionic/epic Boston-fan form:

By Dan Shaughnessy
Boston Globe Staff / June 6, 2008

It goes down in Hub hardwood history as the Miracle on Causeway Street. Paul Pierce and his chariot of fire.

Bill Russell, Bob Cousy, and Larry Bird enjoyed some great moments in the old Boston gym, but not one of those Garden gods ever vaulted out of a wheelchair to lead the Celtics to victory in the NBA Finals.

That’s what Paul Pierce did in Boston’s 98-88 win over the Lakers in Game 1 last night.

In this first-report hometown newspaper report, we see that almost arch (or just naive?), pleasurably extremist form of sports myth-making. If someone is taken off the court and then returns, you don’t just invoke storied injury comebacks from NBA and Celtics history, you give the episode a grandiose name, declare it a chapter in local lore and legend, and toss in a chariot of fire.

We also see a more self-conscious version, which reaches for the epic analogy but calls attention to it in a way that to some degree questions it:

Sports of The Times
Celtics Redux: Grit Over Glamour

By HARVEY ARATON, Published: June 7, 2008
It was tempting after Pierce returned, to hit consecutive 3-pointers in the Celtics’ 98-88 victory, to invoke the memory of Willis Reed’s limping onto the court at Madison Square Garden in Game 7 of the 1970 finals against the Lakers.

So, in this non-booster/fan version, the author can’t resist the “temptation” of using this epic metaphor even as he suggests that it may be exaggerated or not fully earned.

By the time Bill Simmons weighs in at ESPN.com, the metaphor has become controversial and a topic of debate in its own right:

Piercing the silence in Game 1
By Bill Simmons
ESPN, Page 2

If you’re a Lakers fan, I fully support your right to be cynical about Pierce’s injury and return… Only a fool would compare the significance of the moment to Willis Reed, or even Larry Bird’s comeback in the ’91 Indiana series, for that matter. At the same time, the crowd went from “My God, we are completely screwed!” to “My God, we are back in this series!” in the span of 10 minutes. So it WAS a significant moment, whether you like it or not.

Simmons underlines the metaphor’s role in competitive boosterism: the truth of sports as “a mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms” (Nietzsche) turned out against the other team. But even as Simmons declares that you’d have to be a “fool” to believe the analogy, he keeps it in play.

By Saturday the whole thing has metastasized into new metaphors, analogies, and mocking parodies:

Willis Reed comparison sore spot for Phil Jackson
By Mark Murphy
Saturday, June 7, 2008 –
Boston Herald Sports Reporter

Phil Jackson played with Willis Reed. And Paul Pierce [stats], you’re no Willis Reed – at least not in the eyes of the Lakers coach and former Knick.

Mere hours after making references to a “pants malfunction” and a “broken drawstring” when asked about Pierce’s quick return from a knee injury during Game 1, Jackson expanded on his skepticism.

Told some were comparing Pierce’s return to Reed’s limping return to the floor in Game 7 of the 1970 Finals, Jackson responded yesterday as if asked about the lone gunman theory.

“Well, if I’m not mistaken, I think Willis Reed missed a whole half and three quarters almost of a game, and literally had to have a shot – a horse shot – three or four of them in his thigh to come back out and play,” Jackson said. “Paul got carried off and was back on his feet in a minute.

“I don’t know if the angels visited him at halftime or in that timeout period that he had or not, but he didn’t even limp when he came back out on the floor. I don’t know what was going on there. Was Oral Roberts back there in their locker room? But he certainly carried some energy back on the floor for them.”

With Doc Rivers invoking Lee Harvey Oswald, the analogy goes over the top:

Pierce’s plight source of friendly debate
Associated Press
Saturday, June 7, 2008

(06-06) 18:54 PDT — Paul Pierce’s return to Game 1 of the NBA Finals – shortly after he was carried off the court – was great theater. But was it award-winning acting or Willis Reed Part II?

Lakers coach Phil Jackson, who had front-row seats at both events, wasn’t impressed.…

Jackson’s doubts about Pierce’s injury were relayed to Celtics coach Doc Rivers, who responded: “Oh, I don’t care. Aren’t we skeptics anyway now about everything? So what the heck; let it begin. Let it begin. Lee Harvey Oswald did it.”

Hugelkultur!

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We are practicing Hugelkultur — we are hugerkulturists. Our garden is hugelkultural. Actually I don’t know much about it, it’s Sarah’s doing. Hugelkultur is a kind of ‘permaculture’ (‘agro-ecological design theory’) that is basically all about using wood as compost. So, as I quipped, someday our descendents will enjoy rich, fertile soil. No, apparently it can work relatively quickly.

Sarah’s explanation: “you make a pile of sticks and dump dirt on top of it, and plant on that. The twigs rot and release nutrients. Also, the area with the twigs acts as a big sponge.” Our whole back yard can become somewhat sponge-like (see previous post about the flood) so moisture-management is important.

You can also see that we made a stone barrier for our vegetable garden — these were stones we found buried in the ground, presumably left over from some older garden. This is where I came in, doing some garden-golem labor. The beans have started to come up.

One effect of our hugelkultural mindset: Sarah now is always looking for promising sticks to steal from peoples’ front yards. She’s previously done this with bags of leaves — in our old neighborhood she used to drive around filling the van with peoples’ bags of yard waste to use as compost. But now sticks too have emerged as valuable garden fodder. Hugelkultur is, according to Wikipedia, also called ‘Magic’ Mound Composting.

That’s Iris with a wiffle-ball bat in the hugelkultur area. Celie took the middle photo.

Flood!

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Amazing flooding here in Bloomington!!! I had to take my shoes off to wade across Third Street — the water was up to my knees, splashing up in the wake of a bus against the window of the coffee shop, and I chatted with a guy whose bike had been swept away downstream in Jordan River! Read in the paper that an SUV floated away for a half block or so on Kirkwood. Craziness.

IDS slideshow: note all the shots of IU students leaping into garbage-and-debris-choked waters; a bit disconcerting one week after the kid died from swimming in the quarry.

more photos.

p.s.  A day afterwards, there were hardly any signs of the flood, it was as if it had never happened.  5 inches of rain in an hour, or something, and then it disappeared.

Local news story of the week

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Local news story of the week:

Police: Funny fudge made with lavender, not pot

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. (AP) — Indiana University police say brownies a girl gave to dorm workers didn’t contain marijuana at all. The leafy substance mixed in was lavender.

IU Police Capt. Jerry Minger said the 13-year-old girl came forward after the case was publicized to let officers know the brownies were safe.

The fudge was given to workers at IU’s Eigenmann Hall on May 23 and police were called after one of the employees took a bite and noticed a green, leafy substance inside.

The girl gave some of the lavender to police for a field test, and Minger said it registered a “weak reaction” on a test for marijuana.

The girl made the fudge for a school project, in which she had to make a Swedish food.

Information from: The Herald-Times, http://www.heraldtimesonline.com

This story received coverage and updates all week. The Herald Times even saw fit to bestow one of their dreaded ‘onions’ (as in Orchids and Onions, an editorial system of praise and blame) on the malefactors who decided to secretly intoxicate the unwitting IU administrators who work in Eigenmann Hall. Quite a letdown to learn it was all a misunderstanding borne out of a local student’s quest for better understanding of world cultures.

Sarah pointed out that it showed a confused, Reefer Madness-esque mindset to believe that someone would make a big expensive batch of pot brownies and… hand them out to random university administrators.

One question: what kind of school project requires that you “make Swedish food”? Hmm, maybe there is more to this story after all…

Our Beehive Wedding Cake

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Our friend Linsey has posted on her blog about all the wedding cakes she’s baked. Turns out ours was the first, back in 1999 — and what a spectacular and delicious creation it was: “in the shape of a bee hive and… decorated with gold leaf and sugar bees. Sarah had made a bee painting and I wanted to try and capture its spirit in a cake. The cake itself was lemon and it was filled with ground pistachios and white chocolate mouse.” If I recall correctly, Linsey had to carry the layers of cake, frozen, as carry-on luggage in her suitcase from Chicago (or wait, where was she then? Atlanta possibly?); and then it was 99 degrees on our wedding (in July) and the cake was in constant danger of melting…

Condi Rice’s Favorite Kiss Songs

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May 31, 2008

Arts, Briefly

Kicking Back With Kiss

Compiled by FELICIA R. LEE and MELENA RYZIK

It is unclear whether they discussed makeup, but on Thursday in Stockholm, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had a late-night meeting with the rock group Kiss. Ms. Rice was in Sweden for an international conference concerning Iraq; the band was there to play a sold-out concert and asked to meet her. After a dinner with Carl Bildt, the Swedish foreign minister, Ms. Rice joined Gene Simmons, Paul Stanley, Eric Singer and Tommy Thayer in the executive lounge of the Sheraton Hotel, where they signed autographs and gave T-shirts to her staff. “It was really fun” to meet them, Ms. Rice said, according to The Associated Press, adding that they seemed well informed about politics. Though she said she had never seen the band perform, she named “Rock and Roll All Nite” as her favorite Kiss song.

Her complete top five list:

  1. “Rock and Roll All Nite”
  2. “Goin’ Blind,” which details a doomed romance with an underage girl; the original title was “Little Lady.”
  3. “Rock And Roll Party” — untitled hidden track from Destroyer; it is a loop made up of the choral melody from “Great Expectations” and a concert clip of Paul Stanley telling an audience, “I tell you all, it looks like, it looks like we’re gonna have ourselves…a rock and roll party!”
  4. “Cold Gin”
  5. “Got Love For Sale”

First the voter I.D. law and now this

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First the voter I.D. law and now this: on July 1 a new law is set to go into effect in Indiana that will “force any bookstore that sold even one book that could be broadly described as ‘sexually explicit’ to pay a $250 license fee and be classified as an ‘adult bookstore.'” Indy Star story; NPR story. Under the state’s definition, according to a suit filed by the Indianapolis Museum of Art and the ACLU, “nudes by artists such as Peter Paul Rubens and books ranging from John Steinbeck’s classic Of Mice and Men to many modern romance novels ‘could be deemed harmful’ to minors of varying ages.”

Perhaps they should combine the two laws so that one would have to show a state-issued I.D. to buy any sexually explicit material.

Todd Haynes “I’m Not There”

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Finally saw Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There. I’m a fan of Haynes’, but the movie struck me as really smart and interesting, wonderfully apt in its treatment of Dylan’s identities, but somewhat maddening as a viewing experience. One problem, maybe, is that the postmodern identity-scrambling sometimes simply underlines the basic bio-pic problem: that is, since the actors portraying Dylan are continually changing (and many of them make little effort at verisimilitude), you’re constantly re-confronted with the artificiality and falsity of filmed biography. Of course that’s the point, but the effect is sometimes just clunky and silly. Sarah commented that certain scenes recalled A Mighty Wind, the Christopher Guest mockumentary about the 60s folk music scene: e.g. the Joan Baez character reminiscing.

The movie is always tossing out funny, clever, and memorable details: one I loved, for example, was Dylan clowning around with the Beatles, who appear as manic Teletubbies (played by a quartet of Frenchmen, it seems). It only lasts for about 5 seconds, but is hilarious and perfect. As everyone pointed out, Cate Blanchett is brilliant. Heath Ledger was melancholy to watch. David Cross is amusingly absurd as Ginsburg. I hated Richard Gere and ended up fast-forwarding through some of the late Billy the Kid scenes he’s in. I kind of wish the whole movie had been Blanchett — would’ve been more conventional but more effective, maybe.

Final verdict: not as good as the Dylan memoir. The movie didn’t do too well, did it? You pretty much need to know a lot about Dylan to appreciate it. E.g. why is there a tarantula crawling — that’s a reference to his book of poems; he was a big fan of the wrestler Gorgeous George; there’s a lot of that.

Just listened to a bit of Haynes’ commentary over the last 5 minutes or so — quite eloquent, I’m almost tempted to go back to hear more of it. He ends by saying “I’m just so glad I got to make a movie that ends with ‘Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands'” and there is something to that — it’s great just to have an excuse to listen to these songs in a new context. (Once in sophomore year of high school I spent much of an evening listening to that song — which was an entire album side — over and over. I was a romantic little soul.)

I’m really glad I finally saw Dylan live this year. The university basketball stadium wasn’t exactly the ideal setting, but I loved him and the country-western-Mariachi band he has going these days.

The David Hadju book Positively Fourth Street is great btw and gives a funny, less-reverent than the norm depiction of Dylan (who comes across as a complete jerk, at least some of the time)

Lykke Li “Little Bit”

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In honor of Eurovision (final tomorrow May 24!), here’s a mesmerizing, great single by Sweden’s Lykke Li (love the video, too; dig the calisthenics in knee-high black socks, and the bearded loon on piano).
Lykke Li’s album Youth Novels (to be released in the U.S. June 17) was produced by Björn Yttling of Peter Bjorn and John, which makes sense when you consider the haunting cowbell in this song and something similar in “Dance Dance Dance,” which put me to mind of the whistling and percussion in PB&J’s immortal “Young Folks” (though Lyyke Li is less indie, more dance-pop than PB&J). Yttling is sounding like an indie-rock Timbaland in his resourceful way with catchy little looped pieces of percussion. Really, this is just about the catchiest single since “Young Folks” (OK, and “Umbrella” maybe.)
In “Little Bit” Lykke Li starts with denial — “hands down/ I’m too proud for love” (nice line, suggesting “don’t touch”) — and moves towards grudging acceptance. Actually, the song could do for understatement what Alanis Morrisette did for irony: “I will do it, push the button, pull the trigger, move a mountain, jump off a cliff because you’re my baby and I love you I love you… a little bit.”
Yes, apparently her name is in fact pronounced “Licky Lee.”