(NUNAL) (EYEBALL)

I was happy to spend the day at Gran Plaza Mexico in Harmony, NC on Sunday. There is a monthly jaripeo (Mexican rodeo) there which has some bull riding followed by many hours of concerts of bandas, norteño bands, and banda norteños. This time around the classic Cadetes de Linares played during the bullriding, followed by banda El Dasa and Conjunto Primavera. All were great, very tight, entertaining, and, as is typical, also insanely loud.  Huracanes del Norte  headlined and they were as perfect as always. Plaze Mexico takes place on the groups of the Van Hoy campground, the longtime site of the Union Grove Fiddlers Convention. There is a huge dirt floored hillbilly amphitheater that gets absolute filled at these jaripeos. I've been writing on jaripeos for some time and soon will have a longer piece on the world of Gran Plaza Mexcio

Brittney Cooper gets right to the crux of the matter in this great essay in Salon : "Frequently in conversations that I have observed or participated in with white people about race, the claim is levied that it is Black people “who make everything about race.” But this incident in Waco gives lie to that claim. It turns out that when white privilege is in clear operation, white people are invested in making sure that we don’t see race in operation. Charles Mills, a philosopher of race, has a term which I think applies here: epistemology of white ignorance. By this means, he means that white people have created a whole way of knowing the world that both demands and allows that they remain oblivious to the operations of white supremacy, that white people remain “intent on denying what is before them.” Thus even though three gangs have now attacked each other in broad daylight and killed or injured 27 people, there is no nagging, gnawing sense of fear, no social anxiety about what th...

R.I.P. Tex Logan He just passed away, a sad loss for us all. He was always one of my favorite fiddlers, just a monstrous talent. besides absolutely blistering fiddling, Tex Logan was an electrical engineer at Bell Labs and a pioneer  in the field of sound:  "an early user of computers to simulate the reverberation of sound—work that would prove vital in the later digitizing of music. The co-inventor of “colorless” artificial reverb and ( notes Mark Liberman ) creator of “an important theorem about ‘information in the zero crossings of bandpass signals,’” Logan aided in grounding the electronics of recording in the science of acoustics. Along the way, he patented an echo canceller for satellite communications and worked on the “Shepp-Logan phantom,” which helps render images in cranial CT Scans." I love this exchange in the attached recording: Bill: Play it in a Texas style, however you want to play it. Tex: Well let's play it fast... Real Fast. and his l...

this is a good approximation of how I feel at the moment According to Lucile Armstrong, who has written about the Verdiales fesitval in Málaga, the lead instrument is actually the pandero , the tamborine.

from interfluidity: "I interrupt your punditry to tell you that all your commentary about riots is bullshit and confused and tendentious and fuck off. And that economists, God bless ‘em (no, not really), have a name for this." "...Does that mean I’m a fan of these riots, that I condone the burning of my own hometown? Fuck you and your tendentious entrapment games and Manichean choices, your my-team “ridiculing” of people you can claim support destruction. Altruistic punishment is essential to human affairs but it is hard. It is mixed, it is complicated, it is shades of gray. It is punishment first and foremost, and punishment hurts people, that’s its point. Altruistic punishment hurts the punisher too, that’s why it’s “altruistic”. It can’t be evaluated from the perspective of winners or losers within a direct and local context. It is a form of prosocial sacrifice, like fighting and dying in a war. If you write to say “they are hurting their own communities more th...

Quite an i nteresting interview with Wendy Brown about her new book and her approach to critical readings of neo-liberalism: "   In this book, I treat neoliberalism as a governing rationality through which everything is “economized” and in a very specific way: human beings become market actors and nothing but, every field of activity is seen as a market, and every entity (whether public or private, whether person, business, or state) is governed as a firm. Importantly, this is not simply a matter of extending commodification and monetization everywhere—that’s the old Marxist depiction of capital’s transformation of everyday life. Neoliberalism construes even non-wealth generating spheres—such as learning, dating, or exercising—in market terms, submits them to market metrics, and governs them with market techniques and practices. Above all, it casts people as human capital who must constantly tend to their own present and future value. Moreover, because neoliberalism came of a...

at the alarmed behest of my students at the old fashioned look, I have updated the template here on Nunal. Let me know what you think.