(NUNAL) (EYEBALL)

2012-01-23T00:50:00.005-05:00

This quote in this Sunday Times article which caught my eye, if only for the utter tone deafness of Apple's executives. They are happy to reap enormous profits but unwilling to shape their manufacturing structure in a way that might aid American workers or the overall U.S. economy.

Anyway, the quote is:

"We sell iPhones in over a hundred countries,” a current Apple executive said. “We don’t have an obligation to solve America’s problems. Our only obligation is making the best product possible.”

The article notes:

"As Apple’s overseas operations and sales have expanded, its top employees have thrived. Last fiscal year, Apple’s revenue topped $108 billion, a sum larger than the combined state budgets of Michigan, New Jersey and Massachusetts. Since 2005, when the company’s stock split, share prices have risen from about $45 to more than $427.

Some of that wealth has gone to shareholders. Apple is among the most widely held stocks, and the rising share price has benefited millions of individual investors, 401(k)’s and pension plans. The bounty has also enriched Apple workers. Last fiscal year, in addition to their salaries, Apple’s employees and directors received stock worth $2 billion and exercised or vested stock and options worth an added $1.4 billion.

The biggest rewards, however, have often gone to Apple’s top employees. Mr. Cook, Apple’s chief, last year received stock grants — which vest over a 10-year period — that, at today’s share price, would be worth $427 million, and his salary was raised to $1.4 million. In 2010, Mr. Cook’s compensation package was valued at $59 million, according to Apple’s security filings. "

Ok, so none of this is very surprising, even if it is appalling and indicative of the wrongheaded approach of the 1%, whether residing in Wall Street or Silicon Valley, or, gee, in Evansville, Indiana. The lack of care for an impact on local communities essentially makes them no different than other major corporations, of course. Then again, few corporations pretend to be as alternative or countercultural as Apple. It is a deft trick.

If efficiency and profit is indeed its only goal (if you will, "making the best product possible") then Apple should feel fine about choosing profits over community. But Apple at least should be forthright that this is a choice, not something forced exclusively by inexorable market pressures. If the profit differences are small in the end (as the Times article details) even if the pace of change might be a bit slower, is it worth helping to eviscerate the U.S. economies and with it lives and communities around the country?

Community building is not sleek and cool, and it is not efficient. Democracy is not efficient either. American democracy is in fact designed to be inefficient as possible (to its detriment, at times). But community and democracy (as well as health, environmental, and safety standards) are worth investing time, energy, and work in to improve.

Autocracy, on the other hand, is much more efficient. Capitalism operating in an autocratic system can and does achieve that peak efficiency so treasured by Steve Jobs. It does render Apple's old 1984 commercial in an ironic light, however.

I happened to read this article in conjunction with this thorough and quite persuasive post from Frank Pasquale on Balkinization, which details realities at the Chinese iphone factories with consideration of the workers as "animals" to the life and conditions in the Foxconn factory, which he draws from this piece on This American Life (which is, I have now discovered after clicking through, much less annoying to read than to have to hear, though still cloying). He links through to a lot of interesting things, including this test you can take to guage your current "slavery footprint."

Pasquale writes:

"The question for a future economics (and morals) is how to set a baseline "social minimum" for workers in an utterly precarious and unpredictable work environment.

We have the resources to do this. There have been enormous gains in productivity over the past few decades. But the gains are going disproportionately to those at the very top. In the last economic expansion, the top 1 percent of U.S. households captured two-thirds of income gains. Yes, that's 67% going to the top 1%. During the expansion, "the inflation-adjusted income of the top 1 percent of households grew more than ten times faster than the income of the bottom 90 percent of households." The thought that the gains from automation will be shared equally among social classes is about as quaint as this personal robot envisioned in 1961.

Now I'm sure that, among that top 1%, there were some incredibly hard-working geniuses. Maybe some produced productivity gains that were actually worth 200 times more than what the average member of the bottom 99% contributed. But power drives economic outcomes at least as often as productivity. Being able to slash all your workers' pay (or work them to exhaustion in an 110-degree warehouse [Amazon]) simply because there is high unemployment is not exactly a valuable skill. Any fool could improve the bottom line at "a highly profitable company" by "demanding large-scale concessions" from its employees."

2012-01-16T22:33:00.002-05:00

From Jonathan Turley in the Washington Post, this is a welcome and concise reminder just how many of our freedoms have been sharply curtailed in the last decade, and the direct role the Obama administration has played in this process.

"Other politicians rationalize that, while such powers may exist, it really comes down to how they are used. This is a common response by liberals who cannot bring themselves to denounce Obama as they did Bush. Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), for instance, has insisted that Congress is not making any decision on indefinite detention: “That is a decision which we leave where it belongs — in the executive branch.”

And in a signing statement with the defense authorization bill, Obama said he does not intend to use the latest power to indefinitely imprison citizens. Yet, he still accepted the power as a sort of regretful autocrat.

An authoritarian nation is defined not just by the use of authoritarian powers, but by the ability to use them. If a president can take away your freedom or your life on his own authority, all rights become little more than a discretionary grant subject to executive will.

The framers lived under autocratic rule and understood this danger better than we do. James Madison famously warned that we needed a system that did not depend on the good intentions or motivations of our rulers: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.”

Benjamin Franklin was more direct. In 1787, a Mrs. Powel confronted Franklin after the signing of the Constitution and asked, “Well, Doctor, what have we got — a republic or a monarchy?” His response was a bit chilling: “A republic, Madam, if you can keep it.”

Since 9/11, we have created the very government the framers feared: a government with sweeping and largely unchecked powers resting on the hope that they will be used wisely.

The indefinite-detention provision in the defense authorization bill seemed to many civil libertarians like a betrayal by Obama. While the president had promised to veto the law over that provision, Levin, a sponsor of the bill, disclosed on the Senate floor that it was in fact the White House that approved the removal of any exception for citizens from indefinite detention.

Dishonesty from politicians is nothing new for Americans. The real question is whether we are lying to ourselves when we call this country the land of the free."

2012-01-03T02:58:00.004-05:00

It has been six months since I posted anything, but I'vre had a good excuse. Two good excuses. I'll let the following picture do the talking. This was taken Jan 1, which saw a beautiful 70 degree day here in Norfolk:

For those of you keeping score, that is indeed two more Little Buddhas in the picture. They are, from left to right, Birch and Aura. Longtime readers of Nunal will of course recognize the original Little Buddha on the far left, hugging Wee Oscar and now quite grown.

The babies arrived in the summer and it has been survival mode around here since.

{personal note to future parents of twins: having two babies at one time is insane....}

There is no way here to realistically catch up what has been happening. And I promise I won't write some insufferable Adam Gopnik style book about the process either. We'll just call the last half year one of those lost horizons and move on. I'll be back on Nunal more reliably now.

2011-06-26T23:06:00.006-04:00

I've been not posting much, but it has been a busy summer. (Of course I'll have nothing but time when the twins arrive...) This month I have really had the pleasure of engaging the two major aspects of my interests in history and music.

Currently I'm at a Society of Ethnomusicology NEH Institute at Wesleyan University for a couple of weeks. Since this is the epicenter of the study of ethnomusicology it is a huge honor to be here. The scale of the program both intellectually and in terms of infrastructure for the ensembles is really astounding and enviable.

The focus is on ethnomusicology and global culture, so it is pretty exactly in line with my interests, and it has been a lot of fun too. A truly astounding bunch of scholars here too, I am really pleased to have the opportunity to spend time with them and learn from them. Here are a few photos Wesleyan put up on its page.

Then of course my major interest is in American foreign relations, and I just got back to Wesleyan from another typically fascinating time at the annual SHAFR meeting. This year the very positive trend of greater temporal and topical diversity in the panels has continued.

I chaired a roundtable called “Bringing the Law Back In: New Approaches to the History of the U.S. in the World” where we discussed some new approaches and our new research. It was a nice opportunity for me talk about my new book, which I was happy to hear people have begun reading. I am getting a longer description of the roundtable together and when it is ready I will post it.

2011-06-14T00:52:00.003-04:00

I was really saddened to find out that George 'Speedy' Krise died on June 9, 2011. He had a really moving memorial service today at a Baptist church in Chesapeake, and will be buried in Hinton, West Virginia, where he was born.

Speedy was 89 years old and his passing marks the end of an era in country music. I've known Speedy for about 6 years and have been visiting him in a nursing home since he had a stroke about a year ago. He was an incredibly nice guy and I am very sad that I can't spend more time with him.

Speedy was one of the true pioneers of the dobro in early country. He was one of those crucial sidemen in the classic bands who really invented the music and the playing styles. Speedy is credited with being the first the dobro player to record bluegrass during his stint playing in Carl Butler's band in 1950-51.

The music of Speedy's that most changed my own life was his groundbreaking playing on Molly O'Day's classic sessions for Columbia Records. That was an incredible band, with Skeets Williamson on fiddle, Speedy on dobro, Lynn Davis, on guitar, and Mac Wiseman on bass. All backing Molly's incredible voice.

I listened to "Lonely Mound of Clay" on the way to Speedy's memorial service and every part of that song is heartbreaking and perfect, from Speedy's intro and playing throughout to Molly's voice.

Speedy also performed for many years on radio stations like WJLS in Beckley, West Virginia and at the legendary WNOX in Knoxville throughout the 1940s and 1950s.

Speedy was a songwriter of note with songs recorded by Roy Acuff, Carl Butler, Mac Wiseman, and Jim & Jesse among others. It was from singing on a demo of Speedy's songs that Carl Smith first came to the attention of Peer-Southern Music and Columbia, launching his career. Speedy continued to play and record music after moving to Akron, Ohio, notably with his good friend Glenn Lehman.

Speedy had a lot of stories about his long career. He remembers eating fried chicken with Little Jimmie Dickens when the news came on the radio about the bombing of Pearl Harbor. He loved to play, sing, and talk about music until the very end, and after he couldn't play anymore he still sange. He even sang several songs at his 89th birthday party last month.

One of Speedy's lines that I remember most was "I always thought it wasn't country music if you don't play 'Maple on the Hill.'"

We'll miss you Speedy!

2011-06-14T00:22:00.007-04:00

Somehow over a month has passed since I posted here. It's been a busy one, as they tend to be in the summertime. I wanted to post some pictures quickly before too too much time passes.

The usual start to the summer is the Tejano Conjunto Festival en San Antonio, and this was an especially important year since it was the 30th anniversary. This was certainly among the best I have attended in the six years I've been going.

here is a view of the always crowded dance floor.

I was in San Antonio for a long time and also had the opportunity to go to the Royal Palace ballroom for the daily dances. I forgot to take a picture, but I did remember to get one of Lerma's the legendary club on the west side that I usually describe as the CBGBs of conjunto music. The building it is in has been condemned so Lerma's is soon going to be gone forever.

I also had the opportunity to visit again the storied Macias bajo sexto shop, the Stradivarius of San Antonio. I am thinking of writing the history of the Macias bajo, which is a story that really needs to be told. Here is an image of George Macias, grandson of the founder, standing beneath two oil paintings of his grandfather and father. These paintings were made from some iconic photographs by a painter in Iraq hired by George's son, who is serving in the military.

And the most incredible experience I had this time was spending two days with Santiago Jimenez, Jr. listening to his and his father's music and to an array of stories that can only be captured fully in a book (hopefully a forthcoming one...)
Here is Santiago in his iconic pose, with an accordion recently painted expressly for El Chief:

It happens that this week I just had an article titled "Transmission of Texas-Mexican Conjunto Music in the 21st century" published in the International Journal of Intangible Heritage (article downloadable for free here), so things have lined up fairly nicely.

I have a lot more to say about all of these experiences but will wait until there is some more time.

2011-05-07T21:29:00.005-04:00

a friend of mine now in his second year of keeping bees, and in the process of starting to make splits of the hives he overwintered, writes "I'm sure at least one of them will die this winter after eating another 100lbs of sugar. By the way, do bees actually make surplus honey or is that a rumor made up by the National Association of Cane Sugar growers?"

Of course he is really just headed down the path of exponential growth, as most all beekeepers do to within a couple of years. I was up to 30 hives for a time (considered "sideliner" status) but have dropped back to a comfortable 15. Though I did split some hives this week and made three new ones.

I truly like that people I have have introduced to beekeeping have become obsessed. And really good beekeepers, too. One created a new beekeepers organization of a hundred plus people. An old friend of mine now has 40+ hives in SC and has swept the state fair prizes with honey and wax entries for the past few years. Obsession with bees, a good thing to spread!

2011-05-07T20:52:00.004-04:00

I was an instructor at Madison Area Technical College before and, for a semester, after getting my doctorate. I never experienced any discrimination, but this history instructor did, and he just got $1.1 million for getting terminated after complaining.

Note to administrators who favor retaliation: Like, uh, firing people making discrimination claims who also happen to be educated and motivated enough to get a PhD but strapped enough to be teaching at a school like MATC-- not a good idea unless you plan to go to court. Especially in Wisconsin. Or at least, in pre-Walker-ite Wisconsin, who knows where things are headed nowadays.

I may not have been discriminated against at MATC, but like all highly exploited adjuncts, I was paid such a tiny amount of money per huge class that is appalling to recall: $1500 per semester class. That was only a bit more than a TA at UW got per month, but without the benefits. And at MATC.

For some reason I used to think that it mattered. All at the same time I taught at MATC, was a TA, and had a classified state job as well. I used to get home from MATC at 9 am, sleep a few hours, than do the other jobs until 2am. Living the dream.

That is a key part of the Big Lie foisted on history PhDs (actually, some of it is self-generated), which is that it is worth it to work for less than you'd earn doing virtually anything else in order to validate the decision to get a PhD. Neat trick, it has been spun into a continent-wide system of adjunct exploitation which is at the center of the massive expansion of higher education.

2011-05-05T23:05:00.002-04:00

I was really struck by the choice of "Geronimo" as the code name for the operation to kill Osama bin Laden, and so I wrote a short piece called "Geronimo, Bin Laden, and U.S. Foreign Policy", which is now up on the History News Network. Let me know what you think!

Another article on understanding bin Laden's death in the broader context of U.S. foreign policy, "Osama bin Laden is gone, but US war in the Middle East is here to stay" by the always insightful Andrew Bacevich is worth reading too.

2011-05-04T10:07:00.003-04:00

I've been working on a project documenting the visual and musical impacts of Latino (mostly Mexican) migration to the Southeast, and now my photographic collection called "Latinization of Southern Space and Place" is online, hosted by the University of Richmond. Go check it out.

I really like how the page was designed by Nathan Altice, it makes a huge difference to have a functional and dynamic webpage.

This is one of my favorite images, from Winston-Salem

Though this is probably my favorite

2011-05-04T09:46:00.002-04:00

None of my students seemed to want to talk about anything related to the bin Laden capture other than the possibility that it hadn't actually happened. There was animated discussion about the likelihood of lies in this killing, but not much else. Why is that?

This made me start thinking about the unusual prominence of conspiracy theories in the news overall, which seems to have accelerated recently. These theories have always existed, of course, but it strikes me that the way they are discussed in the forefront of the news is something new.

So we have newspapers reporting on the idea of releasing bin Laden death photos while discussing how this might quell the voices of those spinning conspiracies. If nothing else, this shows the centrality of conspirators in shaping current politics. But why should we take conspiracy theorists seriously rather than just ignoring them? Why thrust them into the conversation of reasonable people? It is a constant requirement now for government to prove its legitimacy in all cases.

I asked one of my colleagues (an expert on colonial America) if he can think of a comparable situation. It is not as if conspiracy theories have not always found traction in the American hive-mind (he cited Hofstadter, as you might expect), but the fact that that self-serious news outlets report on conspiracies now as a matter of course is, frankly, a bit bizarre.

It is almost as if the conspiracy theorists are being given equal time. Some examples of this would be the Big Lies foisted by the Swift Boaters, the death panels, and the Birthers. Any stupid idea expressed or lie floated is treated now as something to be considered and disproven.

Yes, the fact that it is right wing conspiracies that always get a lot of play should not go unnoticed. The right has perfected the art of the smear and the Big Lie, and the effective spinning of conspiratorial floss into political gold. The media dutifully reports these claims.

But the big media reporting on Donald Trump's lines seriously is in fact as morally defensible as serious reporting on recent statements from Christian Identity adherents. The rantings of a fool are not inherently news.

Keep in mind that I don't believe what the government says in most cases, like any sensible person. But this does not require the creation of fantastical conspiracies.

Plenty of for-real ones exist, created in the same precincts on the right. The same people nowadays pushing conspiratorial readings of anything that deviates from their narrow political readings are most often the ones who ran real Constitution-endangering conspiracies like Iran-Contra, Bush v. Gore, or the Iraq War.

2011-05-02T23:08:00.005-04:00

It is hard to sort out exactly how to respond to the killing of Osama bin Laden. That is an understatement.

I do believe it is a positive thing that this mass murderer is dead, and I am as impressed as anyone by the raid (and looking forward to Mark Bowden's book on the subject). But to have a real coherent, official "response" yet, no way.

Remember the Onion headline after 9-11 "HOLY FUCKING SHIT". That perfectly captured that uncapturable moment. But this moment is orders of magnitude less and besides relief this chapter is over, what it ultimately means is less than clear. When I heard last night my response was, appropriately, "whoah."

And certainly I don't have the immediately visceral response of any coherence. I have not been consumed with the relief, glee, or blood thirst that seems to be the more typical response. Running like a fool into the streets chanting and singing is actually inconceivable, is it not? More than a bit too similar to the crowds in those "other" countries chanting and singing in ecstasy when a murderous terrorist attack has been executed successfully. This clearly isn't V-J day. Ain't nobody coming home from the 3+ wars we are in at the moment.

The historian in me knows enough to keep my mouth shut for a time. The citizen in me, roughed up by the last decade, is realizing that this decidedly strange political moment requires a hell of a lot more temporal distance to fathom.

(Though let me pause to ask, what exactly did Obama mean with this line: "But tonight, we are once again reminded that America can do whatever we set our mind to. That is the story of our history, whether it’s the pursuit of prosperity for our people, or the struggle for equality for all our citizens; our commitment to stand up for our values abroad, and our sacrifices to make the world a safer place."

Killing bin Laden showed that the United States can do anything it sets its mind to? Was the killing of this terrorist after only ten years really equal to creating the richest society in the history of the world (his first example)? Ending segregation (his second?) Or, picking a really low hanging fruit, getting men on the moon?

I think this line is intended in a few ways. It remind critics that Obama is not Carter, and this raid was emphatically not Desert One. And that Obama is not Bush. It is a subtle but vital dig--under Bush everything essentially fell apart, and the search for bin Laden was literally the prime example of any inability to accomplish this fundamental thing, whereas Obama is actually showing signs of being that mythical beast, a competent politician who gets things accomplished with relatively little showboating.)

The media machine on this story, in speed, detail, and roll out, is just astonishingly deft and totalizing.

My seeming inability to instantaneously get with the big celebration may come from the awareness of just how much has happened since 9-11.

It is unalterably clear that bin Laden being dead is not going to change the realities created by George W. Bush, creator of his own reality (recalling that surreal Karl Rove line which has its own Wikipedia entry under "reality based community").

Since the Afghanistan war has mutated into something having nothing to do with al Qaeda, and seemingly interminable, and the Iraq War was never about 9-11 and is supposedly over though actually not, what exactly should a response be to bin Laden's death? I don't know. What to make of the ongoing low-intensity warfare in Pakistan, the legality of which was rather rapidly shunted aside? Carl Levin's sabre rattling today asking very stern questions about what Pakistan knew is a sign where this new path to permanent, ever-morphing war might lead.

I'll end with a question rather than a response: who is now going to serve as the face for the daily Two Minute Hate?

2011-04-22T14:04:00.003-04:00

I'm in San Antonio at the moment at a conference (presenting my work on the Tejano Conjunto Destvial en San Antonio) and also getting in as much new research and interviews on the subject as I can.

Oh, and eating a lot of Mexican food, too.

Yesterday I spent much of the day at the Macias bajo sexto shop, an institution in San Antonio and surely one of the most significant luthier shops in the United States, if one of the least known. I'll write about the experience in greater detail when I have some time to do it. I am simply pausing with my computer as I EAT lunch, then on to better thingts.

Today taking in many other locales and talking to people, all culminating tonight with the Conjunto Kingz de Flavio Longoria at legendary VFW Post 4700. Much more scheduled for tomorrow.

2011-04-22T13:51:00.003-04:00

I was really thrilled to get a copy of my book in the mail the other day. It is not officially out yet but I guess this is the early printing. The press tells me it will be distributed within six weeks, right on time.

Of course I am really excited. It is hard to really capture what it feels like to have a book out after so long working on it. Better yet when people actually read it. Since it is coming out in paperback I have hopes that people will actually read it too. Not exactly going to be sold in airport bookstores, but this book sho8uld be interesting in lots of diverse ways my first one apparently might not have been (though, I must say, it was not bad!).

Of course the delay in distribution should not stop you from ordering it today on Amazon!

Actually, my book is already up in full on Google books, which is kind of amazing and ever-so slightly freaky.

I definitely can't complain--I've read a lot of new books on Google books as well as all manner of 19th works. I consider it a totally invaluable resource. Often if a book seems interesting enough from perusing it on Google I'll buy it but no way I could buy all of the books I used on the site. That is how it is supposed to work, of course, though I suspect it does not always.

Google books is a godsend for people toiling at institutions with terrible libraries, maybe the greatest single leveling force (and joining such pioneering sites as SSRN and the UW-Madison's FRUS site).

So, my book can be read for free there and it is hard to complain, especially if you believe in the free flow of information. I am certain that being on Google books increases exposure for books exponentially, especially academic titles.

So there is it, go buy several copies for your and your friends and read it in whatever form. Come on in, the water is warm.

2011-04-15T01:21:00.003-04:00

Here is a typically sharp takedown (and historical contextualization) of Obama's war in Libya from Andrew Bacevich, whom I am glad to see will be speaking at the SHAFR conference this summer.

Essential things

2011-04-04T23:44:00.004-04:00

My professor in college, N. Gordon Levin, used to require that our essays reflect the "essence of the essence of our thinking." This required focus and thought, to say the least.

This crystalline description is something I have continued to think about and use with my own students today when I describe what I want in their papers. I of course give Professor Levin credit.

(As long as I mentioned Professor Levin, I should note that he is a legendary professor who in addition to his influential work on Wilson, launched an incredible number of people into careers as historians. In the half century he has been teaching he also inspired who knows how many others who actually went on to get gainful employment in other fields. I meet people all the time who had his classes and were deeply influenced by them.)

Anyway, I put a section in one of my grade sheets that has different boxes to be marked for no essence, essence, pure essence, and essence of the essence. Few get to that highest realm, but it does happen. Most aspire to it, and it helps.

A cousin of mine married a guy she met in an ashram in India (an American) who had adopted the name Humkara. He says it means "sense of nonsense." I've been meaning to put a place on the grade sheet but haven't made that step yet.

I was thinking about all of these things when I saw that the Buddha had some thoughts on essence of the essence. This is no real surprise, but it is worth floating out there to place alongside Professor Levin's formulation:

"Those who mistake the unessential to be essential
and the essential to be unessential,
dwelling in wrong thoughts,
never arrive at the essential."

Its in the Dhammapada. You can hear it in the original Pali here.

maybe they should subpoena his emails

2011-04-04T23:38:00.004-04:00

Glenn Greenwald:

"Harry Reid and Lindsey Graham yesterday both suggested that Congress take unspecified though formal action against the Koran-burning by Florida preacher Terry Jones, which triggered days of violence this week by angry Muslims in Afghanistan. Graham in particular -- using the "but" that is the hallmark of all enemies of the First Amendment -- said: "Free speech is a great idea, but we’re in a war."

This whole post is worth reading in its entirety, I am just excerpting his main points. Don't stop here, go read his elaborations of each.

"There are several points worth highlighting about all of this. First, it demonstrates how many people purport to believe in free speech but don't. The whole point of the First Amendment is that one is free to express the most marginalized, repellent, provocative and offensive ideas."
...

Second, this event demonstrates one of the most uncounted (though one of the most intended) costs of our posture of Endless War: the way it is exploited to endlessly erode core liberties.

...

Third, there is an extreme irony in Harry Reid and Lindsey Graham, of all people, suddenly worrying about actions that trigger anger and violence in the Muslim world. These two Senators, after all, have supported virtually every one of America's actions which have triggered vastly more anti-American anger, vengeance and violence in the Muslim world than anything Pastor Jones could dream of spawning -- from the attack on Iraq to the decade-long occupation of Afghanistan to blind support for Israel to the ongoing camp at Guantanamo."

2011-04-04T22:30:00.003-04:00

This is a surprising fact given the growth in all sectors of the economy and population:

"Today’s nationwide supply of movable honeybee hives, at 2 million hives or somewhat more, is only half what it was in the mid-1940s, says Eric Mader of the Xerces Society, an insect-focused wildlife conservation group in Portland, Ore. Yet the U.S. acreage needing pollination roughly doubled during the same time."

My sense is that despite the size of the commercial beekeepers with thousands of hives, there aren't that many of them. I spoke with one in Santa Barbara (600 hives) and he said he basically knew all of the major beekeepers in California since it was a surprisingly small group.

I'm glad to see that there is still attention being given to the crisis of the bees this spring, like in this article about experiments with blue orchard bees.

I liked this description of the situation of pollinating bees in the California almond crops: "like other migrant farmworkers, honeybees face risks from exposure to pesticides as well as from the stress of a nomadic life."

While encouraging natural pollinators (and the article has a decent list of possibilities at the end, mostly different kinds of solitary bees) I think the key is to directly and honestly address the issues facing beekeepers and to accept the need to transform the system in sustainable ways. This means smaller yields and more work, but also creating a system that is likely to last rather than to fail spectacularly.

2011-04-04T22:05:00.002-04:00

As we've told a few people already, the big news around here is that we are expecting twins. We found out today that it will be a boy and a girl. We are definitely stoked.

Lark, who has just recently found out herself, is now insisting that we call her "Big Sister" rather than Lark.

It is fairly impossible to wrap my mind around completely, especially in terms of the exponentiality involved, but it is an impossibility of lesser intensity than the level that was involved in having Lark. It will be a little while until they arrive, which is good as I madly scramble to get things together in these parts.

Alas, we aren't going to be somewhere interesting during the first year of these kids' lives, as we were in Seoul for Lark. That also means it is necessary to reconfigure things at home rather than simply split the country and worry about it later on. It will also mean we won't be able to simply put the babies in a stroller and walk a few blocks to a sashimi joint serving fresh flounder and nakji. Oh benighted fate!

At least my need to have a lot of banjos of all sizes and descriptions suddenly makes real, practical sense. Each one of these kids is going to need their own instrument for the Colonel's Finest Banjo Orchestra we roll out in a few years time.

2011-03-26T13:48:00.005-04:00

the bizarre answer to the central question of the day: "why is no one in jail for defrauding the country?" is that someone is, just a small fry who probably did nothing wrong. It is redundant to note that the CEO crooks who created the mess have no fear whtasoever of anything other than a slap on the wrist.

If you have any inkling or thought that our political and legal system is not wildly out of control, you must read this absolutely astonishing and disgusting story from the NYTimes today. It is about the federal government going over a small fry who supposedly committed mortgage fraud while it continues to ignore the actual crooks who destroyed the financial and mortgage systems.

"On Valentine’s Day, the elder Mr. Engle said, his son had entered a minimum-security prison in Beaver, W.Va., to begin serving a 21-month sentence for mortgage fraud. He then proceeded to tell me the tale of how federal agents nabbed his son — a tale he backed up with reams of documents and records that suggest, if nothing else, that when the federal government is truly motivated, there is no mountain it won’t move to prosecute someone it wants to nail. And it was definitely motivated to nail Charlie Engle.

Mr. Engle’s is a tale worth telling for a number of reasons, not the least of which is its punch line. Was Mr. Engle convicted of running a crooked subprime company? Was he a mortgage broker who trafficked in predatory loans? A Wall Street huckster who sold toxic assets?

No. Charlie Engle wasn’t a seller of bad mortgages. He was a borrower. And the “mortgage fraud” for which he was prosecuted was something that literally millions of Americans did during the subprime bubble."

The story gets more insane as you read it, and the punchline at the end would be funny if it wasn't such a clear sign that this country is politically and morally bankrupt in addition to the financial bankruptcy.

2011-03-26T13:16:00.004-04:00

Bill Cronon is definitely one of the last historians at the University of Wisconsin (where I went to grad school) that I would think of as a radical or even as very political. Even his masterwork Nature's Metropolis, which I happen to be using this semester in my 19th century America class, is marred by an inattention to politics (though still a very fine book, a real model of the craft in many other respects).

I thought Cronon's op-ed in the NYTimes the other day was actually quite moderate and reasoned, it sounded exactly like him.

But he has gone and launched a shit-storm by simply being a reasonable fellow in an increasingly unreasonable state in a crazied time. The Republican party in Wisconsin is now seeking his emails through the open records law. What triggered the attempt to intimidate Cronon came from his excellent report on the rightwing consipiracy behind the recent anti-Union push (which is essential reading, here).
he concludes:

"What you’ll quickly learn even from reading these few documents is that ALEC is an organization that has been doing very important political work in the United States for the past forty years with remarkably little public or journalistic scrutiny. I’m posting this long note in the conviction that it’s time to start paying more attention. History is being made here, and future historians need people today to assemble the documents they’ll eventually need to write this story. Much more important, citizens today may wish to access these same documents to be well informed about important political decisions being made in our own time during the frequent meetings that ALEC organizes between Republican legislators and representatives of many of the wealthiest corporations in the United States.

I want to add a word of caution here at the end. In posting this study guide, I do not want to suggest that I think it is illegitimate in a democracy for citizens who share political convictions to gather for the purpose of sharing ideas or creating strategies to pursue their shared goals. The right to assemble, form alliances, share resources, and pursue common ends is crucial to any vision of democracy I know. (That’s one reason I’m appalled at Governor Walker’s ALEC-supported efforts to shut down public employee unions in Wisconsin, even though I have never belonged to one of those unions, probably never will, and have sometimes been quite critical of their tactics and strategies.) I’m not suggesting that ALEC, its members, or its allies are illegitimate, corrupt, or illegal. If money were changing hands to buy votes, that would be a different thing, but I don’t believe that’s mainly what’s going on here. Americans who belong to ALEC do so because they genuinely believe in the causes it promotes, not because they’re buying or selling votes.

This is yet another example, in other words, of the impressive and highly skillful ways that conservatives have built very carefully thought-out institutions to advocate for their interests over the past half century. Although there may be analogous structures at the other end of the political spectrum, they’re frequently not nearly so well coordinated or so disciplined in the ways they pursue their goals. "

I actually think that all public records should be accessible (agreeing with Jack Shafer in this regard) but I also think that going after a college professor is clearly the kind of assault on free thinking that it is a Republican hallmark.

Sure, professors at public universities are public employees, which is why it is so easy to find out their pay. (Oddly, I searched for a young historian recently on google and the very first thing that came up about her, before even her faculty page, was a webpage detailing her salary at a public university).

But anyone who thinks that public university professors are to be treated the same as politicians or as employees like civil servants is, frankly, an idiot and a danger.

Politicians are servants, and there is nothing they do that should be kept from public view. They should have nothing to hide since they serve entirely at our pleasure and to reflect our interests. Yes, this is in theory. The reality is they are self-interested, vainglorious, and very often corrupt. Since they in fact have plenty they wish to hide, we need robust open records laws to compel their attentiveness to the public good.

Clearly too, state bureaucrats can't be allowed to abuse their positions by taking state time for private or political acts. If they are clocked in, they should be doing the public's work, and if not they they can of course do whatever they want.

I was once a civil servant in the great state of Wisconsin (Technical Services Assistant-Senior was my title) and I can say that every single second of every single dayI was on the clock I had no thought but public service. Or something like that.

But professors are different and have to be held to different standards. Most importantly, there is the idea of academic freedom. It is absolute and must not be endangered because of currrent politics. Academics should be able to say, think and communicate whatever they want and not have the newly elected crooks go on a crusade (or in the case of Cronon, the state party hacks).

Furthermore, this position cannot be said to be a regular workplace concept. When does a professor's workday end, for example, and where does the work take place? (and yes, I am well aware that university professors who teach 2 classes max and have TAs to do all the real work can't actually be said to be working, but that is a different issue).

If a professor is constantly grappling with issues and ideas and communicating same, than the limits on their workplace and their use of essentially free resources like email should not be subject to the same scrutiny as the workaday accounts of Jane Q. Publicemployee.

I am glad, though, that the Republicans picked a fight with Cronon. He ain't no Bill Ayers-like target. Cronon is brilliant as he is calm, and he is as prominent as they come among true academic historians. He is Jimmy Stewart, and he'll be hard to demonize and harder to silence.

2011-03-24T00:18:00.002-04:00

Jack Balkin has a superb and disturbing consideration of the ways Obama's war on terror policies are a continuation of Bush's second term policies, and on the related significance of the torture of Private Manning.

"My view, as I expressed to Charlie Savage in that interview, is that Obama has played the same role with respect to the National Surveillance State that Eisenhower played with respect to the New Deal and the administrative state, and Nixon played with respect to the Great Society and the welfare state. Each President established a bi-partisan consensus and gave bi-partisan legitimation to certain features of national state building.

After the Obama presidency, opponents of a vigorous national surveillance state will be outliers in American politics; they will have no home in either major political party. Their views will be, to use one of my favorite theoretical terms, "off the wall."
...

Yet, one might hope that the Obama version of the National Surveillance State might turn out to be more benign and friendly to civil liberties than the Bush/Cheney version. To a certain extent this is true, but not by as much as you might think. On several fronts, Obama has continued Bush era policies of preventive detention, surveillance, and protection of state secrets. And in other respects, he has gone further....

What the Manning episode demonstrates, however, is that Obama has little interest in spending political capital in reining in many of the excesses of the National Surveillance State. Quite the contrary: he, like future Presidents, will sincerely believe that he needs every ounce of discretion he can get to protect the nation's security. Therefore, if the DOD informs him that we need to make an example of Bradley Manning so there will be no future leaks of sensitive information by disgruntled government employees, then this is a good and proper thing to do. Legal and constitutional scruples against harsh treatment of Manning are, to quote Attorney General Gonzales, "quaint;" entirely inappropriate in the dangerous times in which we live.

In July 2009, I explained that we were witnessing the bipartisan normalization and legitimation of the National Surveillance State, in which the President's power to detain, surveil, and punish at his discretion would be greatly expanded. In the treatment of Bradley Manning, we can see a glimmer of what this will mean in practice. Unless there is a public outcry, we have no guarantee that this exceptional incident will prove truly exceptional. After all, if a liberal Democratic President is willing to look the other way in this case, what can we expect of future presidents of either party?"

2011-03-23T23:01:00.005-04:00

Current events definitely means that sometimes being a historian gets as demoralizing as it does a whole lot easier. Virtually everything on the front page reflects what we are covering in my survey class.

This is not actually a good thing, pedagogical advantages aside.

Take, for example, the financial crisis and the recession. As a historian teaching about the Great Depression this week (causes, responses, legacies, and so on) it is certainly helpful to have this crystalline example of structural inadequacies, greed, bad policy, criminality, incompetent leadership, and suffering to show as a resonant endpoint to all that flourished back in the 1920s and after.

It also rather effectively counters residual progressive historical sensibilities (not to be conflated with the current (mis)usage of the term "progressive"), as things really have not improved at all by so very many measures.

The same goes for the issues of unionism, nuclear safety, American liberal-capitalist internationalism, and on down the line. The disintegration of Detroit is alone something so sublimely wrought that it would be hard to invent it as a historical example.

I emphasize change and complexity over both space and time in my history classes, but just as useful can be the fusion of change and continuity. Anything that helps break the cycle of both linear and progressive history.

In this regard, I've found Kurt Spellmeyer's Buddha at the Apocalypse: Awakening from a Culture of Destruction an interesting take on the notion of progressive change. In it he counters linear habits of mind in some creative ways, especially by tracing the way varieties of apocalyptic thought have influenced all manner of thinking and action. For one think, it breeds what he calls "the mind-set of disposability" rooted in

"free market economics, technology gone wild, and religious fundamentalism-- all three keep our eyes fixed hypnotically on the future as we imagine it. But this habit could be our fatal flaw. Counting on the future reassures because it lets us disconnect from a world of change that will always be unpredictable."

2011-03-23T22:56:00.004-04:00

I don't think there is any question that the wrongheaded involvement in the Libyan uprising has been handled unconstitutionally. But then again, it is perfectly in line behind all of the other unconstitutional wars, large and small, we have waged since 1950.

I am not alone in this thinking, of course, and Michael Ramsey at Opinio Juris has a nice concise discussion of the constitutionally of U.S. war in Libya. He concludes:

"Perhaps, though, the President also has power to declare war (after all, the Constitution expressly says only that Congress has it, not that the President doesn’t, and it could be part of the President’s power as commander-in-chief). Returning to Hamilton, a key passage in his Federalist 32 argued that often constitutional power could be held concurrently by different entities. But, he continued, an exclusive grant of power would arise where concurrent power would be “totally contradictory and repugnant” – that is, when one branch’s exercise of a power would wholly undermine an express grant to another branch. Hamilton didn’t give the example of declaring war here, but it fits his model: war, once launched, cannot be undone without consequences. If Congress’ power is to decide when war should begin, it follows that the President cannot independently launch attacks.

And the Constitution’s drafters expressly described the clause as designed to exclude presidential war-initiation power. James Wilson told the Pennsylvania ratifying convention: “This system will not hurry us into war; it is calculated to guard against it. It will not be in the power of a single man, or a single body of men, to involve us in such distress; for the important power of declaring war is vested in the legislature at large.”

As a result, the founding generation’s views are clear and have firm basis in the Constitution’s text: the declare war clause gives Congress the exclusive power to decide when war should be “declared” – meaning begun by “word or action.” In Libya, President Obama has “declared” a war – a limited one, to be sure, but still a war by 18th century definitions – without congressional approval. That contravenes both the Constitution’s text and the founding era’s consensus understanding."

Jack Goldsmith has a different view and, characteristically, he states it with clarity. He lists the various similar unilateral military actions, beside Korea and Kosovo, he lists Haiti (2004), Bosnia (1995), Haiti (1994), Somalia (1992), Panama (1989), Libya (1986), Lebanon (1982), and Iran (1980), then notes

"Critics will claim that a pattern of consistently violating the Constitution cannot remedy the illegality of these actions. But that is not the right way to view this pattern. An important principle of constitutional law—especially when the allocation of power between the branches is at issue—is that constitutional meaning gets liquidated by constitutional practice."

He concludes that:

"It does not appear that President Obama gave the issue of domestic political support much thought when he turned on a dime last week. This is an astonishing oversight, if it was that, from a man who campaigned on the need for retrenchment and prudence in the use of U.S. military force."

Correct me if I am wrong, but didn't G.W. Bush run on a similar claim in 2000, back in his anti-Wilsonian days? Power gets awfully compelling when you have the levers in your hands.

2011-03-22T02:07:00.003-04:00

If you have some time to kill (and you have institutional access to the database, since it is behind a wall, you can read my new article in the Journal of American Culture on applying sustainability theory to conjunto music here.

If you don't have access you can hear me talk about this in San Antonio next month for free. Or you can just email me.

2011-03-22T01:33:00.008-04:00

[It does get a bit tiresome to post every couple of months while proffering up a litany of excuses, does it not?]

A month of traveling a lot on the weekends and staying on top of my classes during the week (and of course all while swept up in the perpetual whirlwind that is Miss Lark) meant that something had to give, so unfortunately it was Nunal.

I've also been to some fun places which has made blogging less of an option at the time. I went to San Francisco courtesy of the ever-renewable Bad Co. Films Fellowship Desk. While out there I got to see Santiago Jimenez, Jr. play at the 50th Anniversary celebration for Arhoolie Records. It's a nice thing to celebrate for all sorts of reasons, and especially since Chris Strachwitz's musical endeavors definitely changed my life (and all for better too).

From there in short order to New Orleans, Washington, DC, and Chicago, all of which were great fun and none of which will get any real attention here.

Though here are a few pictures of Lark dancing in Audubon Park in New Orleans. Behind her is the island dedicated to Skye's dad, Mims Ochsner.

and then all of us in the same spot once Lark would stand sort-of still:

Now I am back here in time to spend weekends getting the bees squared away for the spring nectar flow. Fortunately I lost no colonies over the winter (though I have heard my bees in Pungo are not booming, I hope to get out there this week. I do have several strong hives that seem like they will do well this year. Optimism triumphs over experience with bees this time of year, something about the bloom that does it...

gone but not forgotten

2011-01-21T12:11:00.002-05:00

I haven't had a chance to post on Nunal, but will get around to updating things around here when I have a chance in the next few days.

But I did want to note the passing of my dog of ten years, Mother Maybelle. She was striken with massive cancer and went very quickly over the past week. Here is a picture of her in happier days:

2010-12-08T00:49:00.001-05:00

From Frank Pasquale at Balkinization, "Why should a country that can't even raise taxes on its richest citizens think it can keep its communications secure? Where's the commitment of resources?"

and this incisive statement:

"Neoliberal policy that always prioritizes freedom over security, liberty over equality, invites the kind of social disintegration of which Wikileaks is a symptom. The Wikileaks cables reveal the ugly bargains needed to sustain a global dream of "spontaneous order" generated by markets. Now a state that has promoted out-of-control information flows finds itself undermined by their reckless uses, and ever less capable of combatting the problem because of the unconstrained capital flows it has also championed. Both the process and the substance of the Wikileaks affair can be embedded in a larger tragic narrative of the unintended consequences of the neoliberal project for its chief exponent."

2010-12-07T00:46:00.003-05:00

Can Julian Assange be extradited to the US, assuming he is caught? Roger Alford takes a look and thinks it will be tricky.

I personally think it will be a really interesting case when the political offense exception gets invoked. This is something I wrote about fairly extensively in my book.

It seems to me that Assange'as acts are going to trigger a discussion about whether they can be seen as "purely political" offenses or simply political offenses compounded by other crimes. The final decision makes an enormous difference.

This (un)helpfully, but more interestingly, in turn produces a series of political decisions masquerading at times as judicial decisions. This should be fascinating to watch, in other words. (The fact that Assange is claiming to be prepared to release some really juicy stuff (or a "poison pill") if he gets pinched is additionally intriguing)

I do wonder why Assange chose to got to England to hide rather than, say a country that has no extradition treaty with the US like Afghanistan. There must be a place or two to hide there.

Yessir, there are all sorts of reasons to go hide out in extradition-free Afghanistan, starting with the fact that the US inability to find wanted fugitives there is, uh, something of a major policy issue.

2010-12-04T20:36:00.002-05:00

Lloyd Gardner has some worthwhile thoughts on the Wikileaks from a historians point of view. Reading Other People's Mail with Wikileaks

Some of the most cutting perspective on the U.S. response to Wikileaks that I've seen comes from Glenn Greenwald in his typically and relentlessly oceanic style. It is worth just going to read his page in full, but a couple of examples:

I like his comparison of Joseph Lieberman's campaign and the campaign in China to prevent any access to the documents:

"That Joe Lieberman is abusing his position as Homeland Security Chairman to thuggishly dictate to private companies which websites they should and should not host -- and, more important, what you can and cannot read on the Internet -- is one of the most pernicious acts by a U.S. Senator in quite some time. Josh Marshall wrote yesterday: "When I'd heard that Amazon had agreed to host Wikileaks I was frankly surprised given all the fish a big corporation like Amazon has to fry with the federal government." That's true of all large corporations that own media outlets -- every one -- and that is one big reason why they're so servile to U.S. Government interests and easily manipulated by those in political power. That's precisely the dynamic Lieberman was exploiting with his menacing little phone call to Amazon (in essence: Hi, this is the Senate's Homeland Security Committee calling; you're going to be taking down that WikiLeaks site right away, right?). Amazon, of course, did what they were told.

Note that Lieberman here is desperate to prevent American citizens -- not The Terrorists -- from reading the WikiLeaks documents which shed light on what the U.S. Government is doing. His concern is domestic consumption. By his own account, he did this to "send a message to other companies that might host WikiLeaks" not to do so. No matter what you think of WikiLeaks, they have never been charged with, let alone convicted of, any crime; Lieberman literally wants to dictate -- unilaterally -- what you can and cannot read on the Internet, to prevent Americans from accessing documents that much of the rest of the world is freely reading."

and his approach to the "The moral standards of WikiLeaks critics"

"Time's Joe Klein writes this about the WikiLeaks disclosures:

I am tremendously concernced [sic] about the puerile eruptions of Julian Assange. . . . If a single foreign national is rounded up and put in jail because of a leaked cable, this entire, anarchic exercise in "freedom" stands as a human disaster. Assange is a criminal. He's the one who should be in jail.

Do you have that principle down? If "a single foreign national is rounded up and put in jail" because of the WikiLeaks disclosure -- even a "single one" -- then the entire WikiLeaks enterprise is proven to be a "disaster" and "Assange is a criminal" who "should be in jail." That's quite a rigorous moral standard. So let's apply it elsewhere:

What about the most destructive "anarchic exercise in 'freedom'" the planet has known for at least a generation: the "human disaster" known as the attack on Iraq, which Klein supported? That didn't result in the imprisonment of "a single foreign national," but rather the deaths of more than 100,000 innocent human beings, the displacement of millions more, and the destruction of a country of 26 million people. Are those who supported that "anarchic exercise in 'freedom'" -- or at least those responsible for its execution -- also "criminals who should be in jail"?

How about the multiple journalists and other human beings whom the U.S. Government imprisoned (and continues to imprison) for years without charges -- and tortured -- including many whom the Government knew were completely innocent, while Klein assured the world that wasn't happening? How about those responsible for the war in Afghanistan (which Klein supports) with its checkpoint shootings of an "amazing number" of innocent Afghans and civilian slaughtering air strikes, or the use of cluster bombs in Yemen, or the civilian killing drones in Pakistan? Are those responsible for the sky-high corpses of innocent people from these actions also "criminals who should be in jail"?

I'm not singling out Klein here; his commentary is merely illustrative of what I'm finding truly stunning about the increasingly bloodthirsty two-minute hate session aimed at Julian Assange, also known as the new Osama bin Laden. The ringleaders of this hate ritual are advocates of -- and in some cases directly responsible for -- the world's deadliest and most lawless actions of the last decade. And they're demanding Assange's imprisonment, or his blood, in service of a Government that has perpetrated all of these abuses and, more so, to preserve a Wall of Secrecy which has enabled them. "

2010-12-02T10:20:00.004-05:00

Sometimes it is nice when contemporary issues make classrooms discussions suddenly and intensely relevant. (True, it helps that this semester I'm teaching classes on globalization, US empire, and Korea, which are ever-giving wells of contemporary focus).

This week there is an embarrassment of riches from the sudden and quite bizarre emphasis on exceptionalism on the right (and critiqued from the middle) and of course most of all with the State dept. cable leaks, as well as the net neutrality issue, North Korea, and on and on. Too bad the semester is ending (well, in this sense anyway).

My upper level students have been excited about the diplomatic cables on Wikileaks, and any time students get excited about primary documents this is a good thing. The fact that my globalization and empire class just finished a couple of weeks on cyberlaw and international relations (including discussion of Goldsmith and Wu) has made this whole affair even more timely (as has Eurore's antitrust assault on Google.)

Despite the public sector froth and posturing on all sides, the cables don't seem to me like much more than a glancing first pass at contemporary diplomacy and policymaking, but the accessibility and relative illegality of the material is enough to garner some notice for diplomatic history at least. But unfortunately the fact is that hundreds of thousands of documents are being reduced to bullet-point lists of the most salacious tidbits. Historians tend to deal more than in tidbits (though those discoveries of snarky critique in diplomatic correspondence do help enliven some archival time).

2010-11-22T11:59:00.006-05:00

A friend of mine has a beach house in Malibu. (Yes, having a beach house in Malibu is every bit as incredible as you would think. Having a friend with one ain't bad). This house is not far from the Malibu point. Sometimes it is hard to fathom that it actually exists.

Anyway, Lark and I went out there to see him and so she could play with his kids when we were in California a week ago. The ocean was too cold to go in, but it is still about the most beautiful place in the world. It actually doesn't even look real, does it?

This picture is almost a cartoon. Lark's expression is pretty hilarious, if uncharacteristic.

2010-11-21T21:06:00.011-05:00

Sorry, I've been just flat out too busy to write on Nunal for the past six weeks between staying on top of my classes during the week and then going away every weekend somewhere farflung and fascinating.

My life recently has been a rotating and really incredibly interesting series of academic conferences and music festivals encompassing a cross section of everything that makes this country interesting and also happily included some of the very best places to eat that I can think of.

The places were Nashville (for the American Folklore Society meeting), San Benito, Texas (Narciso Martinez Festival), Lafayatte Louisiana (the unparalleled Blackpot which I am finally going to write about), Los Angeles (the utterly fascinating Southwestern Law School Extraterritoriality Symposium), and Philadelphia (American Society of Legal History meeting) just this past weekend.

(And there there was also one weekend at my old friend's son's bar mitzvah in LA. It is more than a bit odd when your friend's kid already is old enough to have a bar mitzvah).

At these places I've been presenting my work on extraterritoriality, extradition, and Conjunto music, or doing new research on my sustainable music project, so everything is South Texas related even if it is all quite different. It's been both very instructive and an incredible amount of fun.

The real pleasure has been the opportunity just to be around so many accomplished scholars and musicians. Expertise and mastery in any field is always a pleasure to be around, and I feel like I've learned more in the past couple of months than in any span I can think of recently.

I wouldn't complain if the whole year was this intense, though it would be tough to survive.

I have had a lot of different experiences everywhere, worth detailing here at Nunal, and some good pictures to post, maybe I'll get some time over the Thanksgiving break.

And truly nothing beats coming home to Skye and Lark. The only bad part about travelling is being away from them.

Here is Miss Lark in full fall splendor today:

2010-10-25T22:27:00.003-04:00

It won't be out to the spring, but here is the cover for my forthcoming book. I am very much looking forward to its release, to say the least.

2010-10-25T22:10:00.006-04:00

When you keep bees, the top questions tend to be: Do you get stung alot? Are your hives collapsing? Do you have honey for sale? and "What about killer bees?"

Africanized bees have been found officially in Georgia after a man was killed by a disturbed hive he knocked over accidentally with a bulldozer.

This is a big concern for beekeepers outside of Georgia because the south Georgia beekeepers supply most of the package bees in the southeast. This means that if beekeepers buy packages of bees they could potentially to very likely have Africanized strains. This is not good for beekeepers or for anyone else. These bees are extremely defensive and can be dangerous, especially in the places most beekeepers keep bees.

The Africanized bees have been spreading for sometime, check out this 2009 map of their progress (from the Georgia Beekeepers' site):

Africanized bees are so-called "killer bees." There is a lot of good information on the Georgia site (which hasn't been updated after this attack yet).

A beekeeper I know here in Virginia told me that when he was being certified to sell bees some of his hives had some Africanized strains which he had to eliminate before being certified. Generally the perception is that Virginia is too cold for them to last, but knowing how rapidly and successively the bees reproduce it is not surprisingly that some genetics have entered the stream here.

This is why there is such a strong emphasis on producing local queens and nucs. The key is strong local hives and no need to buy packages.

Another part of the equation which can't be overlooked is the bad press a death via Africanized bees produces. People already harbor unreasonable fear of bees, this will just make it worse.

Can octopus heads be hazardous to your health?

2010-10-21T10:19:00.002-04:00

This is seriously troubling news:

Can octopus heads be hazardous to your health?

How many octopus heads is it safe to eat on a daily basis?

The government says two is the maximum, because of heavy cadmium levels found in local and imported octopuses. But that has infuriated restaurateurs and fishermen in South Jeolla, who say the government’s warning has cost them a bundle in lost sales.

The octopus head war began in September, when the Seoul Metropolitan Government announced that it discovered heavy concentration of cadmium in octopus heads sold in Seoul.

According to the city government, of three Korean and six Chinese octopuses purchased at local fish markets, supermarkets and department stores, up to 29.3 milligrams of cadmium per kilogram was found in the heads, 14 times higher than the permitted level of 2.0 milligrams. Cadmium is a carcinogen that also poisons the liver and kidneys.

The government advised consumers to completely remove any internal organs, ink and intestinal matter before eating octopus heads - which restaurants rarely do because it takes away most of their taste.

Octopus heads are a favorite dish in Korea because of their nutritional benefits and reputation for building sexual stamina. Nakji-bokkeum, a stir-fried octopus dish, is known for going well with soju.

As concerns grew, the Korea Food and Drug Administration on Sept. 30 released its own research results on 67 local and imported octopuses. Its conclusion: “It’s okay to eat two octopuses per day without removing the internal organs of the heads.”

Then came the backlash. A group of 30 fishermen from Muan in South Jeolla met Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon on Oct. 8 and threatened to sue the city government if it didn’t offer an official apology and compensation for business losses. Muan and Sinan, both in South Jeolla, are the two main octopus producers in Korea, with over 2,000 households engaged in the business. Over 12 million octopuses worth 40 billion won ($35.4 million) are produced every year.

Mayor Oh apologized for causing losses but explained, “The intent of the research was to inform people of the health risks of eating internal organs of octopus heads, and it didn’t mean people shouldn’t eat octopus.”"

It is reassuring that one can still eat octopus as long as you are willing to eat cadmium.

As much as I enjoy eating octopus, both as nakji bokkeum and simply raw with salt and sesame oil, I must admit that recently I have been troubled by eating octopus because they have consciousness and may even dream.

Our kids is learning! or, Arguments for home schooling, part xix

2010-10-20T21:44:00.009-04:00

On reason to learn some history is so you don't look like a complete fool, such as this Republican candidate in NJ who identified Dred Scot as the recent Supreme Court case he most opposed.

That is always a great moment, when candidates reveal that they in fact know nothing at all.

Knowledge of recent Supreme Court decisions (or the Constitution more generally) is not considered a qualification for the candidacy for the Grand Old Party. Christine O'Donnell could not even conjure up any case, from any era.

Another important reason to learn some history is so that the kids learning it are not fed lies reflecting current reactionary politics, as they are in Virginia as a matter of official state business.

In this fine state, to which I am compelled to pay taxes to support the schools and to which I send x amount of my students each year to become teachers, the Education department uses a 4th grade history text book called Our Virginia: Past and Present by Joy Masoff. Ms. Masoff isn't a historian. But since the state education standards are writtem by non-historians, why have students use a textbook written by anyone other than a non-historian? It makes perfect sense, of a sort.

The author has also authored Oh Yuck! The Encyclopedia of Everything Nasty and Oh Yikes! History's Grossest Moments and Fire! and Extreme Sports: Snowboard! and Emergency! and Our World Let's Go! and Everest: Reaching For The Sky (which for some reasons does not have the !) and The Boo Boo Book (also sans !) Masoff is quoted in a news story saying "'I am a fairly respected writer.'"

I personally think she should have said "I am a fairly respected writer!"

This book being forced upon a generation of 4th graders. This is an age which I suspect is especially impressionable and open for ripe manipulation by those in power. (isn't this the age of kids pressed into child armies in Africa?) The key with the Big Lie is to tell it early and often enough for it to become received wisdom (see "creationism, textbook presentation of" ).

Masoff's book claims that large numbers of black confederates fought for the Confederacy. The research this information was based upon came from the "internet," particularly from the site maintained by the Sons of Confederate Veterans. The Washington Post drily notes "Scholars are nearly unanimous in calling these accounts of black Confederate soldiers a misrepresentation of history."

But since the Sons don't believe that slavery was a cause of the war, clearly their standards of historical knowledge are not finely honed.

It does make me wonder why any textbook writer is drawing information from websites of political interest for a 4th grade textbook. She is not even claiming to be using Wikipedia. Or blaming her "cousin" for providing the information. She just took fabricated information from a neo-Confederate group and then folded it into her book where it is effectively a landmine.

The shameful thing is that the Education department claims that it is not responsible for this "'Just because a book is approved doesn't mean the Department of Education endorses every sentence,' said spokesman Charles Pyle." Um, really? If the state of Virginia forces this book upon every student this does in fact imply that it endorses every sentence. Otherwise, why use the book? And if it doesn't endorse it, then why not allow teachers the freedom to choose their own books according to their own educations? (not that that would necessarily be a good idea, let me add).

Ironically, Masoff also wrote We Are All Americans: Understanding Diversity

2010-10-20T21:29:00.002-04:00

We were in Nashville over the weekend and had a chance to go see Jim Lauderdale play at the Station Inn. He was great as usual and he had a seriously excellent bluegrass band backing him, so the whole show was incredible. That place is justly famous as a venue, it had about the best sound I've heard and is so small that even against the back wall you feel like you are right next to the stage. And people go there to listen, so you could hear everything. A hell of a show (and a stark contrast to what is going on musically and otherwise at the bars on Broadway, which are also fun of course).

The weird moment in the evening was when John Oates of Hall and Oates fame, who happened to be in the audience, came to the stage to do a fingerpicked number backed by Jim's band. I can't actually remember what he played, it was something standard. He is a good musician as you'd expect, and I guess into the traditional stuff and playing it these days (?). Can't say I've been keeping up on the trajectory of his career...

2010-10-11T23:43:00.006-04:00

We have these crazy daisies which grow to 7 feet tall and bloom in October. The bees love them too. Here is Miss Lark standing with them today:

She kept running through them and hiding and then running out and saying 'I'm going to the hide and seek!"

2010-10-11T23:26:00.003-04:00

The Richmond folk festival was the usual great time this past weekend. I am not sure how it happens, but the weather is always perfect during the festival.

All of the music was great. Maybe the most interesting thing I learned was that West Virginia old time fiddler Lester McCumbers, who is 89 years old, has never been to Virginia before coming to the festival this past weekend. He sounded really good, elemental as that style is. His son Billy sang some songs too in a perfect, rough and keening mountain voice, just beautiful.

As for other highlights, Los Texmaniacs played their usual good set, and Bonsoir, Catin, a Cajun band, was really superb. Sometimes I wonder why I listen to anything other than Cajun music. But then there is "Viva Seguin".

Usually this festival is listening oriented, and there is so many different artists to hear that you really need to be there all weekend. But it turns out the best time I had this year was playing tunes. My friend Don Leister is a violin maker in Richmond and he had a booth as a craftsman at the festival which also served as the epicenter for the old time people there.

Since I've been thinking about festivals and will be delivering a paper about one this week at the American Folklore Society meeting in Nashville, I was thinking a lot about the structure and theoretics at this one. But I didn't let thinking get in the way of a good time...

Sic semper tyrannis

2010-10-11T23:22:00.004-04:00

My student whom I mentioned the other day as having the Confederate flag on his truck corrected me, so I told him I would run his clarification since I had misunderstood him:

"Correction: I do not consider the Confederate Battle Flag as my National Flag. The Confederate Battle Flag was not a national flag, it was a flag used to identify individual military units on the battlefield. Please correct me if I am wrong. What I do consider my National Flag is the Third National Flag. This is the one with a white field and a red stripe down the side with the Battle Flag in the top corner. I do not have a Battle Flag on my truck. I do have a sticker of a Third National Flag, one of the Bonnie Blue Flag and finally, a sticker of a Virginia State Flag. I feel that these three flags indicate where my loyalties lie."

2010-10-11T01:25:00.005-04:00

It is probably just plain ole sensible politics that if you want to get into office you shouldn't be spending your weekend dressing up like a Nazi, as Tea Party Republican candidate for office Rich Iott does.

2010-10-08T02:14:00.006-04:00

Here is a worthwhile interview with legal scholar Christina Duffy Burnett, who does really interesting work on law and American empire. (I discovered this interview through Opinio Juris) If any of my globalization and empire students are reading this blog today you'll want to read it for sure because it directly reflects our reading of the past week. Nice when it works out that way.

I have never met her, but we are on a panel together at the upcoming meeting of the American Society of Legal Historians and I am looking forward to meeting her.

This interview was of particular interest to me since she has written on the U.S. guano islands, one of my favorite topics.

I managed to get a bit about a guano islands case in my new book in discussing US legal spatiality, and of course I've been really interested in guano issues since I wrote my MA thesis eighteen years ago comparing the British and American responses to the guano supply crisis of the 1840s and 1850s.

Sometime I need to publish some part of that work, the issues are too important, and too intrinsically interesting on a variety of agricultural, sectional, legal, diplomatic, and global scales. It's guano, after all.

The trade included everything from the constant attentions and sabre-rattling of the State Department to enslaved Chinese workers hurling themselves off of guano cliffs rather than continue to mine it, to goat herders on a tiny speck of land in the Persian Gulf called Kooria Mooria driving off the British attempt to create a national source of guano. The more I think about it the more it is insane that I have been working on anything else.

The legal status of the islands is every bit as fascinating as Burnett describes, but I strongly believe that the territorial issues are only part of their importance in terms of U.S. imperial governance and the role of an activist state in foreign economic policy.

It was the American price controls and monopolistic structuring of the guano trade that were coupled with the territorial assertions that were the most important features of the Guano Act of 1856. It was a massive expansion of federal power in the service of both the slaveholding interests in Virginia and Maryland and the commercial interests in Baltimore and New York. The Guano Act was, incredibly, sponsored and pushed by no one less than George Mason and William Seward acting in concert in 1856 of all tumultuous times.

And it really worried states rights fanatics, for instance (to pick one at non-random) Jefferson Davis, who was then in the Senate. In 1860, he called the Guano Act "extraordinary in its character and...really dangerous in its effects." Davis warned that the Guano Act had created:

"in the interests of the guano trade, a power far more extensive than any contemplated in any provision which has moved before in the Senate of the United States. It is better to arrest our steps...[and] proceed toward the repeal of the act. I see no stronger reason for interposing the whole power of the Government to protect this traffic than any other...My objection is, therefore, a radical one. It goes to the whole theory of the act. It covers the entire system."

There is a lot more. I think I will return to these issues.

Meanwhile, go check out the interview. It also features this nice old image of the Chincha Islands, and some others too.

And if you are on campus, stop by my office and I will show you the 50 lbs guano sack I have from that era. (it is just the sack mind you, the guano is long gone).

"God bless the military-apiological complex!"

2010-10-07T09:53:00.004-04:00

I am fortunate that so many people I know send me links to major news stories when there is one that is right in my idiosyncratic range of obsessions (that is, most stories generally about either bees or the death of a famous old country or bluegrass artist).

Today it is this important NYTimes article about the possible cause of colony collapse disorder. Scientists and Soldiers Solve a Bee Mystery

The news is really that it is the viral-fungal combination that is causing the problem. The role of Nosema Cerena has been pretty widely known for awhile, but the viral addition is new. New and quite fascinating too is the role of military researchers in this.

The very best comment I received on the story was from my former colleague at Sogang University who wrote "God bless the military-apiological complex!" I wish I had coined that phrase.

This is a good place to put in a plug for you to read this interesting new book I just read, Six-Legged Soldiers: Using Insects as Weapons of War. I've been trying to figure out which of my classes is suitable for this book.

2010-10-02T14:49:00.003-04:00

I was just sending this link to a friend of mine and I thought it would be worth linking to here at Nunal, really striking photographs from a series titled "What is American Power?" looking at the power grid and its social context by Mitch Epstein.

An extremely well done website too, worth looking at just because it it so well constructed in displaying each image.

I keep stumbling on these incredible photographers, and guessing that there are almost a limitness number of incredible photographers webpages out there, just a matter of finding out about them. And time too, of course.

My friend I sent this to is a really fine and interesting photographer himself, Andrew Miksys. Worth checking out his webpage. And buying his book BAXT.

2010-09-23T00:18:00.003-04:00

One of my students (not coincidentally one who has a confederate battle flag on his truck who said cheerily he "considers it my national flag") was arguing today that secession was legal and that the Surpeme Court had never ruled on it. Actually, it did in Texas v. White 74 U.S. 700, which you can read here.

some relevant passages:

"

But the perpetuity and indissolubility of the Union by no means implies the loss of distinct and individual existence, or of the right of self-government by the States. On the contrary, it may be not unreasonably said that the preservation of the States and the maintenance of their governments are as much within the design and care of the Constitution as the preservation of the Union and the maintenance of the National government. The Constitution, in all its provisions, looks to an indestructible Union composed of indestructible States.

When Texas became one of the United States, she entered into an indissoluble relation. The union between Texas and the other States was as complete, as perpetual, and as indissoluble as the union between the original States. There was no place for reconsideration or revocation, except through revolution or through consent of the States.

Considered as transactions under the Constitution, the ordinance of secession, adopted by the convention, and ratified by a majority of the citizens of Texas, and all the acts of her legislature intended to give [p701] effect to that ordinance, were absolutely null. They were utterly without operation in law. The State did not cease to be a State, nor her citizens to be citizens of the Union."

2010-09-20T22:46:00.004-04:00

My old friend Brett disappeared from the US, I thought to head off to Cambodia for two years in the Peace Corps. I've been waiting to hear from him. Now he has reemerged and it turns out he decided to go to Indonesia instead. He's living next to this volcano:

Fortunately he is keeping a blog now too.

2010-09-15T08:59:00.000-04:00

Miss Lark in a favored spot

2010-09-10T14:17:00.002-04:00

After a busy week even by the standards of a new semester I'm glad to be off to the Rockbridge old time festival up in Buena Vista. Yup, 'Buena Vista' is pronounced Buuuna Vista," this being Virginia.

I think I write that every year. Though not last year, since I was in Berkeley and happy to be out that the great little Berkeley old time festival, which had a great dance among other appeals.

But nothing is like Rockbridge, nice low key little festival in the mountains, weather is almost always perfect, and the music sounds uncommonly good there for whatever combination of factors.

And this year there is a pie auction at 1 a.m. That is one of those things that might only make sense within the context of an old time festival.

2010-09-06T14:26:00.005-04:00

I wrote a short piece about looking at extradition as a foreign policy which is up on the History News Network, go take look.

I was inspired to write it after reading about Viktor Bout, the Russian arms dealer. The US originally sought to extraterritorially abduct him and send him to a compliant state, but in the end has traded weapons for him to be extradited from Thailand. I've been meaning to write something since the Roman Polanski bru-ha-ha this summer but haven't had a chance. This recent case finally spurred me on.

It happened that I also was just thinking about Roman Polanski because I just watched the Ghost Writer, which has an interesting arc, is well acted, and worth seeing. Especially as Tony Blair's memoirs are being heavily promoted in 'news' stories in the media this past week or so.

it was fun while it lasted

2010-09-06T02:19:00.004-04:00

..."democracy" and "civilization" that is.

At least according to the stunningly ill-equipped "Future Analysis department of the Bundeswehr Transformation Center, a think tank tasked with fixing a direction for the German military."

This set of secret analysts using ultra-secret matrices has detected that there might be concerns about the world oil supply.

Der Spiegel has an article about how the new German government secret report on how peak oil is going to end it all.

Military Study Warns of a Potentially Drastic Oil Crisis

"The term "peak oil" is used by energy experts to refer to a point in time when global oil reserves pass their zenith and production gradually begins to decline. This would result in a permanent supply crisis -- and fear of it can trigger turbulence in commodity markets and on stock exchanges.

The issue is so politically explosive that it's remarkable when an institution like the Bundeswehr, the German military, uses the term "peak oil" at all. But a military study currently circulating on the German blogosphere goes even further."

Actually, this der Speigel piece reads pretty close to an Onion spoof.

The report makes some really stunning predictions, such as that oil producing nations are going to be rich and that the free markets might be manipulated by states interested in energy supplies. Stunning, no?

And then there is this breathlessly delivered hooey:

"the scenarios outlined by the Bundeswehr Transformation Center are drastic. Even more explosive politically are recommendations to the government that the energy experts have put forward based on these scenarios. They argue that "states dependent on oil imports" will be forced to "show more pragmatism toward oil-producing states in their foreign policy." Political priorities will have to be somewhat subordinated, they claim, to the overriding concern of securing energy supplies."

Yup, a secret government report has determined that oil dependent nations are going to think about cheap oil and start kowtowing to oil producing states without even thinking about democracy.

And this right when Iraq has become free, independent, and democratic because of the actions of the USA, which the same cabal of secret government analysts has shown has never even considered the politics of oil. Or something like that.

I'm actually a donkey!

2010-09-05T03:39:00.007-04:00

Floyd's passing reminded me of a book I really liked that I read actually before I kept bees, it just has more resonance nowadays: Lars Gufstasson's The Death of a Beekeeper. It is about a beekeeper who dies of cancer.

(Now that summer is gone you can put aside the light fare and read something a bit less uplifting).

Gufstasson is an interesting and unexpected writer, I have liked most all of his stuff that I've read, like "Elegy for the Old Mexican Woman and Her Dead Child."

I often think of these lines of his, which first led me to his poems. They read a bit differently in the post 9/11 era then they did before:

"Dogs! Hangmen's servants!
Royal torture masters!
Haven't you understood?
You there, heating tongs over a coal fire!
I'm actually a donkey!
With the heart of a donkey and the bray of a donkey!
I never give up!"

Death of a Beekeeper

2010-09-05T03:25:00.005-04:00

The best part of the storm passing is that the weather is now absolutely perfect.

Which is good because today was the memorial service for Floyd Watkins, a local beekeeper who just passed on at the ripe old age of 85. Floyd was one of the founders of the Tidewater Beekeeping Association and truly a beekeeping institution in these parts. He had retired from the Navy long ago and made his money removing bees from people's property, among other things bee related.

I've known Floyd for a decade and enjoyed talking bees with him over the years. I got some good advice from him, and I liked working with him in the TBA.

Probably the most fitting thing for a memorial service for Floyd was that afterward the formal service (with 21 gun salute) we ate a bunch of fried chicken and other food and talked bees. One thing beekeepers can do, especially the old timers, is talk bees. I enjoyed it, I've been wrapped up with things so much that it has been far too long since I have seen a lot of these people, lots of good friends and mentors.

Floyd lived in Knotts Island, North Carolina, which is just south of Virginia Beach and Back Bay. Out on the island he raised kiwis, I think the only guy around here who did it commercially. At the memorial service his wife carol told me that last year they had 20,000 kiwis to pick and she expected the same this year. Since I have always eaten his kiwis I am glad that she'll be continuing to harvest them.

We tried to get some kiwis going on the VWC campus to complement the bees (they are a fruit that needs pollination) but the spot we picked for them was too wet.

Students wandering out by the lake will notice a couple of large wooden Ts to the left of the path, that was the failed kiwi arbor.

Maybe we should try again, now that the bees are set up by the organic garden, and the soil is dry.

I left Floyd's service and went to see my bees which are way out in Pungo and just down the road from Floyd's church. Despite the fact that I only go visit them once or twice a year, they were going strong and had a lot of honey. The key truly is to set them up right and leave them alone.

2010-09-05T03:20:00.002-04:00

Well, hurricane Earl turned out to be a non-event which I'm not complaining about, especially now that things are watertight here, after no little expense.

My feeling with these things, being a practical Midwesterner, is that the generally slothful sorts around here get used to these kind of semi-regular non-events and so are a bit cavalier towards all storms. And then people act surprised when they are terrible, like everybody did when Isabel caused so many problems.

Of course maybe I am just a wee bit chicken when it comes to hurricanes, being a practical Midwesterner used to being surrounded by hundreds of miles.

2010-09-01T16:37:00.005-04:00

If it wasn't bad enough to have to live in Norfolk in regular quiet times, this week we face the possibility of having hurricane Earl sweep through or at least "brush by" in the artful language of the weather people. Brushing by is not exactly optimal since it can entail a whole lot of destruction. There is a 3% chance of hurricane force winds hitting Norfolk according to the compulsively readable Weather Underground weather blog. Small but not the preferable 0%. The fact that margin of error is large enough to include a direct hit to the Outer Banks by a category 3 to 4 storm is not reassuring, though my optimistic side (yes I have one, albeit begrudgingly) is that they just say that in case a catastrophe happens, CYA.

And this is a sobering thing to read about what could happen in the NE:

"The NOGAPS model brings Earl closest to the coast of New England, predicting the west eyewall of the the hurricane will pass over Nantucket at about 2am Saturday morning, and the tip of Cape Cod a few hours later. If this track verifies, 40+ mph winds would affect southeastern Massachusetts for a period of 6 - 12 hours beginning at about 8pm EDT Friday night. Earl should be a weaker Category 1 or 2 hurricane then, with hurricane-force winds extending 30 miles to the left of its track. Hurricane conditions would then affect the eastern tip of Long Island, coastal Rhode Island, and Southeast Massachusetts. Earl's radius of tropical storm-force winds to the north, over land, will probably be about 150 miles, so locations from Central Long Island to southern Boston would experience sustained winds of 40 mph in this worst-case model scenario. A storm surge of 3 - 5 feet might occur in Long Island Sound, and 2 - 3 feet along the south coast of Long Island. A deviation to the left, with a direct hit on eastern Long Island and Providence, Rhode Island, would probably be a $10 billion disaster, as the hurricane would hit a heavily populated area and drive a drive a 5 - 10 foot storm surge up Buzzards Bay and Narragansett Bay. The odds of this occurring are around 5%, according to the latest NHC wind probability forecast. The forecast is calling for a 25% chance of hurricane-force winds on Nantucket, 8% in Providence, 6% in Boston, and 18% in Hyannis. Keep in mind that the average error in position for a 3-day NHC forecast is 185 miles, which is about how far offshore Earl is predicted to be from New England early Saturday morning."

This is a pretty cool picture of Earl form space. Although it doesn't convince me that manned space travel is not a waste of money:

2010-08-29T03:21:00.002-04:00

This is a decent interview with Molly Molloy, who collects news from the killing fields in Mexico and sounds out a report called the Frontera List which is definitely essential daily reading. (Nunal often links to stories from the list).

2010-08-28T23:19:00.008-04:00

It has been a while since I have gotten any pics of Miss Lark up on Nunal. I have some truly random ones with me at the moment. Here she was looking adorable and running around at Clifftop while we packed up.

Here she is making some pancakes:

Lark has been agitating for a "Larkie fiddle" so of course as soon as we got back from Clifftop I got her a 1/8 size one. And she has been playing it at least a bit everyday, totally unprompted on our part. Cross keyed it sounds pretty good. She sings two songs with it (though not at all in time with her playing, truth be told, that is something that will have to come). One is what she calls "My shanty all the time, time time," which is a line she has fixated on from "Keep my Skillet Good and Greasy". She knows that whole song. The other song is Little Richard's "Girl Can't Help it," which she has returned to loving to sing with a vengeance.

Here Lark is posing with her fiddle:

The fact that the other day Lark pointed at Buzz Lightyear from Toy Story with no idea who he was and said "look at that funny man!" and at the same time can sing all of the words to "Keep my Skillet Good and Greasy" and 'Girl Can't Help it" (as well as many other songs) means that something very right is going on, no?

Though somehow Lark has also learned all of the words to Cheryl Lynn's disco classic 'Got to be Real," which she hears as "Got to be Maria," which is the name of one of her friends. So, I am not necessarily including or excluding "Got to be Maria" from the things that are going very right.

I think I have mentioned here that Lark loves 'Ghostbusters," which we listen to on a 45 I picked up. She can of course sing that too. She may know what a ghost is, but I am certain she has no idea what a ghostbuster is.

Now bear with me for a moment, because I need to explain something else. With the Saints in the Super Bowl this year, and of course the lovely Miss Skye being a New Orleans native, the cheer "go Saints!" was something that Lark learned pretty early and can usually say to much general pleasure, whether down in New Orleans or here.

Somehow all of this has fused in Lark's head so she runs into the room and jumps into position to shout triumphantly: "GHO-stbusters Saints!"

The South will rise again, or something like that

2010-08-28T23:13:00.003-04:00

Speaking of things that offend, I was driving in Norfolk today and ended up behind this car with two stickers on the back. The one on the left was a South Carolina palmetto and moon made out of the Confederate flag, there wasn't time to get an image of it. The other side was this:

The medium is the message.

He should have driven up to the Beck-Palin-American Fascist movement event in DC, which was all about the Southern Style.

2010-08-28T22:58:00.004-04:00

I met with my new freshman advisees this week (all classes start Monday) and when everybody was talking about what they did over the summer the student peer advisor working with me (who happens to be African-American) said she spent most of the summer "just bojangling."

When I expressed surprise at her use of the word she didn't know why and neither did anybody else in the room.

Now it sounded to me like it was a term freighted with racial meaning, but apparently not. Nobody ever thought of it like that. I said, well you wouldn't call me an ofay, right? But nobody knew that term either. (Actually, that doesn't surprise me).

Bojangling is rather astoundingly not in the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang or in the Dictionary of American Regional English. I was really surpised, I have to admit.

So, no official "usu. considered vulgar or offensive" to back me up. Still the word strikes me as off, am I really alone in this?

You can google it and it comes up in something called the Urban Dictionary as meaning "Wasting time doin' random shit"

Apparently it is also an adverb with this meaning:

"adverb: Description for a promiscuous set who have a defined 'relationship' but are not an official couple. For this reason, the term provides clarity, while also ironicly providing intentional ambiguity of the nature of said 'relationship'.

The term is derived from the frequency of these sets to arrive at Bojangles from the 10am-1pm range during any given weekend that follows a night of heavy drinking which leads to afore mentioned promiscuous choices. The act is driven by the desperate thirst for sweet tea, and not caring who sees the two of you at bojangles because the need for a hangover cure is so great

These sets typically arrive only as a pair and both in pajamas and sandals. The ladies of this set also typically sport mens shirts and pony tails."

But Urban Dictionary seems at least partially designed to give funny definitions so people buy mugs, t-shirts, or magnets with the words on them.

Dictionary.com has a more pointed definition of bojangling with a decidedly racial component drawn from the Dictionary of American Slang and Colloquial Expressions by Richard A. Spears

So not exactly a neutral word, but interesting that it rankled none of my students. I won't be using it.

2010-08-25T18:59:00.006-04:00

My review of a new book of essays called Buddhist Warfare (edited by Michael Jerryson and Mark Juergensmeyer) was published in the Journal of Global Buddhism, you can read it here, you just need to scroll down a bit.

This was one of the more interesting books I have read recently, especially regarding the terrible and seemingly inescapable array of horrors which always comes form the fusion of state and religious authority, even sadly when that religious structure is the sangha. As I mention in the review, I thought the most interesting pieces in this book (all of which is worth reading) covered the stunning varieties of torture and violence involved in the spread and protection of Buddhism in Mongolia (including breaking people's backs) and the uses of Buddhism in supporting state violence in modern Sri Lanka and Thailand. And the always interesting Brian Victoria, whose work is familiar to my students.

2010-08-18T15:24:00.008-04:00

Actually, I did make it back from Asia, I've just been too busy to post here.

I've gotten enough emails from people wondering if I had fallen off of the planet that I realized I should put something up here. I saw many of my closest friends at Clifftop but not all. Worth it to miss much of Clifftop to have additional days in Asia... but still pretty rough to miss so much of Clifftop!

Right when I came back to Norfolk I discovered ( via a front page story) that I have the distinction of living right next to the most dangerous street in Norfolk. Home sweet home.

What's funny is that I never felt especially safe in Ulanbaatar, while the fact is that it's Norfolk that is deadly and evil.

I had this vague idea of waiting until I had time to organize my pictures but that is unlikely to happen really soon. But I'll put up a couple of critical things.

I did think it was important to put this image up here, but it requires a bit of explanation. In Suhbaatar Square (actually anywhere in Mongolia where more than one tourist is likely to appear) there are painters selling paintings. I don't know if all of them are actually painters, since there is a striking uniformity to the paintings everybody sells. I have a feeling that many of them are churned out in a single locale and then distributed via street sellers, but I could be wrong. All of the paintings are variations on the central Mongolian themes: horses, gers, camels, mountains.

My second day in Ulaanbaatar one guy who spoke some limited English showed me his paintings and as I was trying to get him to go away my phone rang and it was Milo telling me he was just entering the square. This was the first day we were meeting up. As he walked toward us, the painter said "Oh, you're meeting Milo." I was shocked, to say the least, and for a second wondered if Milo had some kind of elabaorate scam going. But this was before I learned that Milo knows close to every single person in Mongolia (and probably most of the Mongolian migrants to elsewhere to boot).

During my time in Mongolia, I kept seeing this same persistent painter since I had to walk through Suhbaatar every time I wanted to get anywhere. I saw him almost everyday. He never failed to try to sell me a painting. I told him that I would buy one if he panited me riding a horse and playing a morin khuur at the same time, with Chingiss Kahn riding alongside me. Thinking that these paintings were all made in Tourist Painting Factory #5 I figured it would never happen. Wrong.

The day before I left Milo told me that the painter had called him and was looking for me since the painting was ready. I walked over to the Square. He had painted it exactly as I asked, though he left out Chingiss. Apparently that was a bit much. He said "no Chingiss."

For some reason he painted me without a beard. And added long hair. But the weird thing is, the really really weird thing, is that this painting looks exactly like what I used to look like when I didn't have a beard and had long hair. here is the painting:

I have a nice picture of the painter holding it up in Suhbaatar but it is one my harddrive which is not with me at the moment, but I will post it sometime.

The other picture I thought I should really put here is of a donkey meat restaurant I saw in Beijing.

It is nothing to see the images of all of the incredible sights there from the Forbidden City, summer palace on down, of course, but I thought this was a bit more interesting.

I was wandering around in an area of the city where there are a lot of musical instrument shops and then noticed this restaurant sign with some donkeys on it.

I thought, that is an unusual image for a restaurant. But not if you are selling donkey meat. Helpfully, there was an English menu, so all of the English speaking donkey meat fans knew what to order. Hard to find a good donkey meat joint when you are traveling, know what I'm sayin?

Hard to say what was more enticing, the "fish soup donkey" or the inspired "Miscellaneous donkey soup". The latter was delicious.

Overall the food in Beijing was as incredible as you'd imagine. There was quite literally nothing on this earth that was not available, from insects on up the food chain. I did get to eat for-real 'Peking duck' and ate some really good and incredibly spicy crawfish and about the best sauteed spinach I've had. I saw on the menu, but didn't eat, fried duck heads or the plate of fried duck hearts. I did not partake of lamb testicles.

2010-07-26T22:12:00.016-04:00

Hard to believe how fast three weeks went by. I'm heading to Beijing today and though I am definitely looking forward to that I am sad to be leaving Mongolia. I actually feel like I've spent an appropriate amount of time in Ulaanbaatar but have an equally strong feeling that I need to get out to Hovd next time I come back, which will hopefully be soon. Much more to do and learn with the music, of course, and I have a far better sense of what I am interested in studying after just a few weeks, especially among the younger players in what are generally called "folk ethnic bands".

I also really want to get to the Gobi. I met some American parisitologists who worked there for a month (30 kilometers from the closest water!) and it sounds like something I really need to see.

I don't have the time now to do a thoughtful retrospect at the moment because time is short, but figured I throw up a few more pictures. And anyway, I am sure the visuals are more interesting then my musings (best filed away in an obscure journal?)

Here is a nomad who set up a ger right in the middle of this industrial wasteland in central UB, grazing horses among these asbestos covered pipes.

These could be his cattle, or someone else's. Even in the middle of the city along these trash strewn waterways (some of which only have water right after it rains) people graze goats and cattle. This is in the middle of the city between the central downtown and the big Nadaam stadium

Here is a huge Buddha at the end of town, not far freom that Chingiss Khan inscribed in the mountainside.

Higher still then the Buddha is a Soviet-era war memorial which offers a nice view of huge sprawling UB. Also a nice aerial into the ger camps which nestle around the base of the monument, a view that is hard to get unless you wander into the ger districts. And one of the most common phrases I heard from expats and Mongolians alike was "don't walk alone in the ger districts."

Here is a view from the top, note Buddha in lower left for scale. I've been living at about one o'clock in this picture.

On top by the monument was a guy selling paintings who also could did a little khoomei. He spoke English reasonably well and it turns out had once toured the U.S. doing khoomei. He was in a chatty mood because a group of French tourists had just bought all of his paintings. (There are a lot of French tourists here, more than any other foreign group it seems. And French cafes and a french bookstore, whereas I don't know of an exclusively English bookshop, though one could exist that I missed). "The French have so much money," he said. He was actually trained as an engineer but when socialism ended he was unable to find any work so instead did singing, which he had learned from his father who was, of course, from Hovd in the West. Now he runs a music school for kids in the ger district, teaching morin khuur and khoomei. His daughter is a contortionist, 11 now but training since she was three. His wife is a Mormon. So this single family is the almost a microcosm of the modern Mongolian experience.

Here a few random pictures from the countryside. I find it hard if not impossible to capture landscape on film. Something to learn how to do.

You can call this the obligatory camel picture.

It is kind of wild to see camels wandering around though.

Here is the Argapala Meditation center, up a ways on a mountain side. The walk to it is over this very swingy bridge of weathered planks and steel cables. For some reason I didn't take a picture closer up to the temple. It was small but impressively set against the mountain with the 108 stairs up.

The lama at this temple was friends with my driver. When we found him he was building something with some carpenters and looked indistinguishaable from them. Most of the meditation happens in these gers, instead a structure.

Actually that is a terrible picture since you can't see the gers. But the view looking this way was nice.

Behind there are some paintings up on the cliff, though also hard to see unless you zero in on this picture.

This is at a nomadic encampment on the steppe. Standing on the steppe is definitely interesting, makes you wnat to be even more remote though at the same time it is a bit wild to be around absolutely no trees. I really would have rather skipped the visit in the interest of going even further, but stop we did, I think because my driver wanted to buy and drink a bunch of airag (it was his birthday). Airag is fermented mare's milk, and this is the season for it. There are gers all over the city selling it, but our in the countryside they give you it free if you stop by and also sell liters of it for about 2000 tugrugs (a bit over two bucks).

Horses, steppe.

I did really like the ger camp stoves, which they sell at the black market in UB (along with all the other parts to make your own ger) but I couldn't really see a way to get it back to the US, alas. Would have been good for camping.

If you are looking for romance in the nomadic life, forget it. The nomads all hung out and watched satellite tv, via these solar panels.

In town you see all sorts of weatherbeaten and very dynmamic looking bandylegged old timers in deels and riding boots looking extremely out of time and evocative. In this nomadic camp everybody wore shiny addidas shorts, flip flops and no shirts and watched some kind of cartoon. It was both surreal and a bit hellish, truth be told.

I don't even have satellite tv, so these folks are keyed in better than me.

My translator grew up in the remote northeast, where Chingiss Khan was born, and grew up in a ger with her parents and 10 (!) siblings. She used to race horses too, and sang a song to the horses she used to sing when starting a ride as we were standing out there, best part of the day to my mind.

2010-07-22T06:40:00.003-04:00

I can't get any of my videos to load, but I am using some seriously creaky technology that I am using illictly from a hotel I just walked in, so I can't really complain too much.

But I can get some pictures up, here are some I said I'd post, one of Otgunjav playing in full regalia in my kitchen

and the other of Jontsan playing the very obscure shuur, which kind of says it all since you can see his mohawk. Actually what captures at least one slice of life in modern Mongolia the video I have of him on another day wearing a Cleveland Indians shirt, a mohawk, and throat singing.

There is a three day Buyrat festival going on at the Culture Palace right across from my apartment, so there are hundreds of Buyrats wandering around in very elaborate deels and the distinctive Buyrat pointed hat, and, better yet, there is a two day long Buyrat singing contest. This was definitely for Buyrats only, the announcing was all in Buyrat, and there were no tourists there. Buyrats are from northern Mongolia and Siberia, so there as quite a bit of Russian being spoken too.

I think it would have been a bit relentless for anyone not really fascinated by this stuff, that is for sure. Everybody sings two songs, one acapella and one with band. The bands ranged from a five or six piece band to a single morin khuur, or a morin khuur and a flute, and in a few very Russian-influenced cases, the accordion. Some of the singing was amazing, but I can't load the video unfortunately. I spent several hours there yesterday and today and I can say that Buyrat music really does sound the same. I'm just kidding, (I am, after all, an old time musician) but it was definitely a uniform sound. I could hum many of the tunes after hearing the same songs over the course of the two days so I am planning to at least come away with some Buyrat tunes under my belt. They were handing out song books too. I know almost nothing about the music and having consulted with an ethnomusicologist here studying Buyrat shamans, there apparently has not been much study of them in English (more so in Russian) so it is not really a surprise.

I'm off to the countryside tomorrow and should have some good pictures from that, very excited to be getting out of the city and see the endless steppe!

May Tranquility Reside Here!

2010-07-20T04:23:00.013-04:00

Turns out today there was a Buddhist Tsam ceremony at the Doscoilin Monastery, which is just a stones throw from the ACMS.

Tsam is an extremely elaborate masked dance to exorcise evil spirits. The monks at the monastery handed me a sheet that called it a "ceremonial secret tantric meditation, which is called the science of 'circle dance' or 'cam', belonging to the category of the ten great and small sciences."

Tsam almost totally disappeared from Mongolia because of communist suppression, and so it is very rare even today. This is the only one held in Ulaanbaatar that is a 'real' for Buddhist not a show one for tourists.

There are a lot of tourist Tsam around, I have seen a bunch. The museums here are also filled with some really beautiful old masks. The show tsams are usally presented along with the array of Mongolian traditional arts: long song, khoomei (throat singing), morin khuur, contortionists, and other traditional dances and some of them are good, though short and of course extremely limited. (I won't even mention the excreble tsam at the Choijin Lama temple because it was excruciating--weak costumes, bad dancing, no horns, one cymbal, and one drum played by a bored woman who was reading her text messages while playing the drum!)

This tsam took place is this pretty ragged monastery that is several large metal buildings built to look like gers, and while there were a smattering of gringos there it was overwhelmingly Mongolians. They might not all have been Buddhists, many were clasping hands but many were not. One guy named Puje who talked to me a great length only came to see what was going on because he could see it from his apartment.

There is a lot of information on Mongolia Tsam here so I don't feel the need to summarize it. The dance is extremely structured both in technique, order, and especially in meaning, and it is worth understanding what each part means. So go read that link.

I was interested in seeing for a couple of reasons, including of course the visual excitement of it but also especially the soundscape of it. Tsam involves a great deal of noise, the long Tibetan style horns called ikh buree, high pitched reeded horns called bishgur, big drums called hengereg, cymbals, and chanting.

What was most interesting to me is how differently the music is presented in this tsam, which was definitely put on believers, and the music of the show tsam. The Palace Theatre tsam, for example, actually has trumpets attached to the horns so they are louder and more appealing, the cymbals are oplayed well, and the whole was really appealing sounding. This live one was interesting but the musicianship was of a whole different order. It is not the point, of course, but it just further compicates the whole presentation of the tsam in the official shows.

I'll post a couple of pics of the tsam in order, some video later once I have time to sort it out, and hopefully more images at a later time since I am sitting in the ACMS office and it is afternoon and I have other things to do:

Here they are burning the sorin balin, which the monks said causes "the end of inner sins, the roots of every bad thing."

Then the whole thing became a parade down the street, which was a narrow street with a newly dug trench in the middle. Mongolians are not big on personal space. I was getting crushed and pressed enough that it was time go (and it had been three and a half hours too).

2010-07-17T13:40:00.012-04:00

The last few days have been good enough that they alone would have made this trip to Mongolia worth it.

Not only have I met, interviewed, and recorded a bunch of astoundingly talented musicians and throat singers, I've had some a chance to play tunes with some one of them for many hours until near dawn, time at which of course music sounds best.

Oh, and swapped my banjo for a morin khuur too, fulfilling some critical corner of my destiny and, more so, the destiny of the banjo in Mongolia. What unleashing the banjo here means is hard to guess, but it isn't too hard to envision a Chingiss style reconquest of most of the world's surface, no?

The banjo is now in the hands of a guy named Jontsan, one of the throat singers from this band:

I didn't film that, this band has a bunch of stuff on youtube including some pretty over the top music videos.

They play every night, which is a grueling schedule. They are very good, playing a Tuvan sounding style of western Mongolian music. With some changes too, to be sure, since they have a dumbek. It is made to look very rustic and nomadic by being covered in fur and all, but it is still a dumbek. I have seen a few bands here that use them.

One of the members also plays in the National Orchestra show which is also every night, so he runs between the two shows. Musicians work hard here, no doubt about that. But they also work a lot, which is hard to complain about if you're a musician.

Jontsan is from Hovd, in the west, the heart of the music. He's superbly talented, plays all the traditional Mongolian instruments but is a specialist and teacher of the limbe, a flute. One of his real specialties is the tsuur, which is an end blown flute that is pressed against a tooth and used while also throat singing. Very interesting and strange sound. The tsuur almost disappeared it was so archaic but he is one of the newer players of it.

I have some pictures and great recordings of it, both solo and also alongside banjo and morin khuur, but I am a bit gunshy about trying out the photos on this borrowed computer after the weird experience of having my computer seize up and crash because of pictures and video. (the Dell technical help rep in the Philippines who I talked to via Skype diagnosed it and the drive is kaput). So Nunal is going to be all text for the duration, sorry.

Jontsan is a dombra player, which is a Kazakh lute that is not terribly dissimilar from a banjo only absent the drone string, and so he really picked up clawhammer pretty quickly after a couple of nights. Some really fine morin khuur players struggled in the same amount of time so clearly he was born to add the banjo to everything else.

I think the western Mongolian folk and dance songs have an old timey sound and many of them can translate fairly well to banjo. The topshuur, which is a two stringed instrument for accompanying songs and throat singing, has a banjo like essence and even used to have a skin head. But long songs, forget it, the banjo ain't built for that.

What is interesting is that when you drive around with Jontsan he listens to the most brutal varieties of Euro pop. Hard to comprehend. Togbokh, who plays igil in the band and is also from Hovd (and who is the one who drives between shows every night) drives around listening to Tuvan music, which makes a bit more sense.

The other guy who was over playing is a professional morin khuur player named Bayart. He is an astounding player too. I can't post the stuff I recorded from him but fortunately he has put a lot of his stuff on youtube (the young guys are pretty stoked to show you their stuff on youtube):

and another great horse song

As yet another fruit of Milo's limitless circle of friends among the musicians in Mongolia, the other day I ran into a shanz player named Otgunjav, who was the #1 shanz player in Mongolia for the national orchestra for three decades before retiring. (She is still pretty young, in her mid-60s, but retired.)

She ran through some tunes on the shanz for me and I was transfixed. It is a three string fretless lute, not too dissimilar from a fretless banjo, and the same as a Chinese sanxian. I played her some banjo at her request. She said "But how can you be a professional musician playing such simple music?" She played a tune for me (called 'folk melody') that actually is nice modal ones for the banjo once I figured it out--though that was a full day after she had marveled at my slowness. But no doubt well deserved but still pretty rough....

But Otgunjav did agree to come by the next day and show me more music, and she was amazing. I also got her life story, which is amazingly similar to the musicians I have been talking to.

She was from a nomadic family way out in western Mongolia, born in a ger. She started the Music and Dance College in Ulaanbaatar at age 11 after winning a contest, and then spent 8 years playing shanz for eight hours a day. I asked her if she studied any other subjects and she said "of course I didn't study anything else, I barely even learned the Russian alphabet. The people at the Music and Dance College were all amazingly gifted with great ability and played music." So she stuck with the music and became the best player of her generation.

After an interview and after she showed us her photo album of playing all over the world, Otgunjav changed into her dress deel and full adornments to play the shanz for us. She said it makes the music sound better to be dressed appropriately. And she was truly transformed too--she showed up wearing a baseball cap and carrying a shoulder bag which read in English: "I am WANT a Hustler" and she took on a truly dignified presence.

I wish I could post a photograph of her dressed in her stunning and colorful deel incongrously sitting in the kitchen of my apartment playing shanz. Surrealistic and incredible. He playing was as great as you'd expect, to my ear especially the western tunes which sound particularly magnificent on the shanz. I'll get something posted online when I get a chance.

Otgunjav really wants to come to the United States and I am going to see about getting something arranged to make that happen. People in the U.S. should hear her play and she likewise more than deserves to play for people.

The best shanz player of her generation and the top player alive in Mongolia, and she lives in an apartment in UB without hot water.

2010-07-14T23:43:00.014-04:00

Something of a technological apocalypse here, as last night I finished writing a very long post on my experience of Nadaam and over the past week, and prepared to load some video on the post of playing, singing and other noisemaking during the festival when something about doing that simple act made my laptop crash.

Now it won't do anything but give me a blue screen, or what geeks call the blue screen of death. Several hours of trying again didn't work. Cursing seemed to have little effect either.

Blue is an auspicious color in Mongolia, and I've always been partial to blue, so I won't call it the blue screen of death, but it definitely seems to signal the end of things for my laptop, which is kaput. It is under warranty but fat lot that is going to help here in Mongolia.

This is going to put a serious crimp in posting to Nunal, to say the very least.

I had some things to send off today, so I walked back to the hotel where I stayed the first night, looked like I knew what I was doing and walked to the computers without a hitch. It always helps to look a bit like you know what you are doing.

...and the photos load fine onto this computer, so clearly something was wrong with that laptop, the videos were just the last straw maybe. I have a lot of good ones of different players, throat singers, and others, but it will have to wait.

Maybe the best unexpected sound I have gotten so far was of the singing done during the game of shooting ankle bones of the camel, goat, sheep, and goat, a kind of low moan. I'll try to figure some way to get my videos posted.

Anyway, I can't sit here for long, but here are a couple brief representative shots so my last posting for awhile is not about the sewer dwellers. That would just be too depressing.

Some fake flowering plants actually planted for Nadaam in a park just east of Suhbaatar Sqaure. I thought it was weird and it was, since there really is nothing blooming in this city except the flowers people bring to musicians after the performances. There were these little fake trees, and numerous fake flowers, and even fake mushrooms around a little pagoda park. Quite strange.

I visited Gandan Monastery last week, which is the largest and most impressive one in the city and among the most important in Mongolia. It has an absolutely huge gold Buddha surrounded by sutras to turn. On the grounds there are many buildings and many more sutras.

Mongolian Buddhist iconography and practice owes a lot to Tibetan Buddhism so it is very ornate, visually and aurally interesting. Here are just a few pics-- one of the monestary hall itself, and then acouple of pictures of some sutras on other temples for people to turn and some places on the walls of the buildings between them where people trace their hands across the walls and then turn and kiss a certain spot. It looks like a heartbeat.

Here is a shot of the archery competition at Nadaam. You can see how close I could stand, this was taken with a little handheld camera. When the arrow hit the target the line of men at the end all raised their hands, when it missed they held them vertically or did a circular "travelling" kind of move with their arms. A lot of fun to watch.

Lots of stuff being peddled at Nadaam. Maybe the weirdest was the guy selling statues of Buddha, Buddhist deities...and Hitler. ??? He was proud to hold it up for me.

Next to him the sellers had the same array, with the addition of Stalin and Lenin and Chingiss Khan. And I think Gorby, but I didn't look at that one too closely.

Now here are some sellers the Tea Party would like given their political sophistication, Hitler AND Stalin AND Lenin.

Actually, there is a neo-Nazi thing going on in Mongolia. The swastikas you see around are not the Buddhist ones.

2010-07-14T09:23:00.004-04:00

I've been relatively too busy to post here for the last week, or at least not taking the time to do it given all there is to do and my short time here.

And then too a couple of days laid up and barely able to move from the bed didn't help things either. Hard to know what was the cause, could have been my over-exuberant consumption of Nadaam hushuur, which is a fried dough pie filled with mutton (or, deliciously, filled with kimchi and meat in special moments). Hard to imagine that it was that, since presumedly frying would kill it all. So some other exotic bug I picked up.

Of which there are many here, no doubt. Just yesterday I stepped outside and saw a man crapping behind the building next to my building. Before disappearing into the sewer. Yup, he crawled OUT of the sewer to crap here on the green earth and then deep beneath. So maybe it was areosolized fecal matter that did me in, I don't know. I don't want to know, actually, now that I am feeling a bit better.

Open urination is not uncommon here, it happens absolutely everywhere all over the city, but I haven't seen a lot of the other.

I had read about the problem of kids living in the sewers in Ulaanbaatar but this seemed both abstract and also in a way to be expected--kids do bizarre things in desperate straits, and there are any number of dirty and heartbreaking street kids running around begging aggressively for money. So their living in the sewers kind of made sense even if it was disturbing.

Though let's be honest, kids living in sewers should be the thing that makes us drop whatever meaningless thing we are doing and devote ourselves to bringing it to an end, it is pluperfect madness.

Though it should also be noted that anyone my age or thereabouts has to be thinking of C.H.U.D. right about now. ("Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers," if you are younger than me)

A few days ago I walked back to my place in the late evening. The walk up to my apartment building is a bit sketchy. It gets exponentially so after dark. The first time I came home after midnight I saw a man lying on the ground with his face covered in blood surrounded by some others, I think cops. No telling if they had just come up opr oif they had beaten the guy. I was in a car, thankfully, making a mental note not to come this way alone.

The approach to the apartment is down a dark street (a couple of blocks or so from Lenin and his prostitutes) then through a short tunnel, and then down a dark street that is very abandoned feeling and even has a dirty mattress tucked up against a decaying building. It looks like a flop, and turns out it is. So not an optimal place to be or walk by, unless you have evil doing to do. Actually, after dark is not the only time it is a bit weird. On Monday midday I walked by on my way to Nadaam and some kids threw rocks at me.

Anyway, I was walking to my apartment building at dusk and I noticed a woman holding a tiny newborn baby sitting on some rubble near the dirty mattress. I thought it was a weird place to cradle a baby, but then again there aren't many other places to go right near the apartment building and maybe she wanted to get some fresh air. The weird thing was that right near her was a man sitting at a manhole with his legs dangling into it. I was hard pressed to think of a reason to dangle your legs in a manhole. The thought occurred to me that he must live in the sewers, which seemed altogether weirder than the kids living there even if it is maybe less depressing since he was, after all, an adult. Anyway, I didn't want to think about it too much.

A couple of days I saw the lady again, with the tiny baby, and the man, who this time was sitting on the mattress with an old woman. I walked to the grocery store and as I was returning it was drizzling and the man and woman and baby were gone. The old lady was adjusting the manhole cover. I could hear the cry of the baby from the down inside the manhole. Heartbreaking and completely insane.

I didn't want to take a picture because, quite honestly, it occurred to me that anyone living in a sewer with a baby has absolutely nothing to lose so why potentially agitate them?

But here is the scene as you walk from my apartment building toward the manhole. The family lives in the sewer on the right.

Today a sinkhole opened up in front of the apartment building, it seems kind of fitting.

2010-07-07T22:48:00.007-04:00

I walked by this statue of Lenin yesterday morning.

Over the next six hours I heard two different stories of prostitution in the shadow of Lenin, (one a hilarious story of a Finnish tattoo artist who was mugged while picking up a Russian prostitute which is a bit elaborate for me to recap here) and a third person tell me the punchline : "Lenin was put there to watch over the prostitutes."

I had some time to kill before meeting with some musicians so I went to the Choijin Lama temple, which is really in the heart of the city. It is one of the few that was destroyed by the communists, in aprt because it was already a museum at the time. Quite a beautiful spot. The wall in front was built to keep out the evils of the Manchus coming up from the South.

The inside of the temple is filled with some seriously terrifying Buddhist imagery, including a ceiling of flayed bodies and decapitated heads, and some silk tapestries of the same.

I spent the rest of the day with a morin khuur played named Milo who seemed to know absolutely everybody in the city. In short order I met all of the major composers (Juntsannorov and Iderbat, to start), throat singers, and morin khuur players who were walking around, hanging around the Palace Theatre, or in morin khuur shops. It is not unusual to see people carrying morin khuur around the city in all directions, of all ages. Milo is studying with B. Togtokhjargal, the 2nd ranked morin khuur player in Mongolia, who in turn studied with the top ranked player in the Mongolia. I am to see Togtokhjargal playing tonight and very much looking forward to that.

Here is Milo playing with Iderbat sitting next to him. Milo plays old timey long songs, and after each one Iderbat complimented his playing, it was quite impressive.

Iderbat really had presence, he projected authority and mastery just sitting and speaking, it is hard to relay it but was a palpable feeling while talking to him,

The role of composers of morin khuur music is something I am going to be exploring in greater detail while I am here. I ate with Munkh-Erdene and some other anthropologists from the National University of Mongolia last night and he insisted very storngly that there are no musical sustainability issues in Mongolia given the institutional structures for training the young, and it certainly is clear that there are no lack of players or venues or shows.

One of the really interesting things that emerged from dinner was a comment from David Sneath, (who is perhaps the most prominent Mongolia expert in the world and of limitless interest) regarding the soundscape of the nomadic life, which has not been really captured and studied in the same way that musical expression has. He described his experiences living with nomads and the sounds. What was really interesting was his descriptions of the sounds made to horses was different from Munkh-Erdene, who grew up in the country in a different region. So the soundscape of daily life and its regional variants seems simply fascinating, and definitely something to think about for a future project here.

2010-07-06T07:26:00.003-04:00

a couple of other shots I took today after walking away from the Zanazabar:

2010-07-06T06:12:00.011-04:00

Now I am well ensconced in some UB luxury so I have a chance to post on Nunal.

Kind of unexpectedly and maybe even unfairly ensconced, I must say. Lap of luxury. The ACMS set me up with a brand new apartment belonging to one of the ACMS staff's friends, who just got the place and hasn't even moved in yet! It is a really nice place with all new and modern stuff, nice kitchen, and even high speed internet. Though there is no shortage of internet cafes around here, they seem to be at least on every block, many of them free wireless.

I was expecting something quite a bit less polished so this was a nice surprise.

This apartment is on the 10th floor right next to the Central Sport Palace (ther owner is a judo coach at the center) and very near the ACMS office and the National University of Mongolia, and about a five minute walk to Suhbaatar Sqaure. Perfect location, in other words. The view out the living room window is of the mountains south of the city, with a nice view of the Chinggis Kahn carved (or maybe inscribed?) on the hillside. (Click on the picture to see if better)

The weather here is unbelievably perfect. The morning was cool and soft, the afternoon very sunny and quite hot, though if you step into the shade it is very comfortable since the air is so dry. Really perfect for walking around, which is what I did all afternoon after giving my talk (a three hour session, so I have earned my keep a bit at least).

Here are a couple of pictures of Suhbaatar Square, check out the sky, unbelievable.

I'll take more and better ones and post them later.

Turns out the red ger in the Zanabazar museum is not actually a red ger, it is a galley called 'red ger'. But it was still great to get to talk there. And it was stylistically a ger, as so many dwellings here, no matter how modern. There is a spatiality to the ger that is replicated into all other living arrangements, and I have been told that even the most seemingly modern and stylish Mongolian adheres in some ways to traditions regarding spatiality and directionality. The great line I was told was "even Miss UB the trendsetter wears the marmot tail." This was the case of a very fashionable woman who was told by a shaman to wear a marmot tail and did so under her clothes.

My talk was sponsored by the Jamtsyn Badraa Foundation, which is named for a famous Mongolian ethnomusicologist who also happens to be the grandfather of my research sponsor here, Tsetse Bator. The audience was a mix of academics and other professors and I gather some people who are involved with the Arts Council of Mongolia. I particularly enjoyed talking with Oyuntsetseg, an ethnomusicologist specializing in the Mongolian long song. It was a lot of fun to get to talk about these topics with a bunch of interested people here.

I talked about the impacts of globalization on musical cultures, the sustainablity theory for music pioneered by Jeff Todd Titon, the possible applications and implications of it in cultural and political terms, the relative value of the Intangible Cultural Heritage designation, and other topics. Tsetse amazingly translated it all into Mongolian which is something that always amazes me, and even more so given the multi-syllabic jargon that I at times do employ when talking about this stuff.

Actually this is a great time to be considering the impact and meaning of Intangible Cultural Heritage since China just had throat singing declared an Intangible Cultural Heritage of China in Inner Mongolia. As you might imagine, this did not fly well here in Mongolia.

I have a slightly better opinion of Intangible Cultural Heritage than does Titon, though I appreciate his critique that it introduces static definitions and some elements of falsity into dynamic and alive musical traditions. But I think if used as a catalyst rather than an endpoint the designation can have value. We don't have recognize it in the US but if we did I think it could have a real galvanizing effect on some of the organizations that is study in the states.

The second half of my talk was more concrete, thinking about sustainable music in terms of old time and conjunto music, and then also talking about migrant music a bit. This stuff was completely new to everybody--and I had musical examples and also played some myself--so I am sure it was a hell of a lot more interesting.

I spent the latter half the day exploring. UB is surprisingly compact, though not really walkable since the sidewalks are in very rough shape in a lot of places, or just dirt in others, and crossing the street is quite honestly terrifying. Mongolians plunge right in, walking between cars, little kids in tow, and no fear whatsoever. Cars don't stop or slow down for pedestrians, everybody gets across frogger style.

Here is a sidewalk, with open manhole. In the back you can see one of the newest buildings, a very dramatic arched buidling called the Blue Sky Tower, it isn't open yet. This is leading to a bridge over a dry riverbed that i have been told people sometimes bring their animals to graze at even in the middle of the city.

UB is laid out with two circles, with the outside of the larger circle the ger districts which ring the city.

This is a great city to be in if you are into decayed landscapes. which I am. This city is definitely decayed in parts. Even this brand new building I am in has chunks knocked out of the plaster walls and the edges of the marble stairs already. There are large garbarge piles around too. Other buildings have lots of wear too, but decades of communist rule, an unforgiving climate, and underdevelopment while grappling with the impact of neo-liberalism actually make none of this a surprise.

Check out the park at the foot of Suhbaatar Square. This is the center of UB at the foot of its most prominent official feature.

Here is a shaman's blue ger I walked past today. There was a bear skin in front of it thrown over a pile of stuff, for someone reaosn I didn't take a picture of it but will since I am sure to pass it again.

There are actually some very modern buildings and many new ones, and there is construction all over the place.

The streetscape seemed very forbidding my first day when I went out upon waking up, but only a day later I've learned to organize the spaces a bit better. There are many fewer big glass store fronts that are so common elsewhere, just walls and doors and maybe a small window, so at first it is more difficult to grasp what the places were.

I'll go take some pictures of what I mean, at the moment I have just wanted to get my bearings and also hit the ground running since my time here is so short.

Yesterday I stepped out of the hotel I stayed in for the first night and walked a few blocks before coming on a conservatory mobbed by people in front, all carrying morin khuurs (the horse headed fiddle, pronounced 'mern hor') and getting reqady for a recital. Since I am here to study music making, this was a definitely a big dose of dumb luck. Even better, in front was a garrulous American happily talking to all around him in fluent Mongolian and also carrying a morin khuur. He was rushing off somewhere but we will be neeting later. This all seemed very auspicious, especially within the first hour of my walking around, so I have high expectations about what is to come.

Here is the school:

One of the things you read is that Mongolians are not interested in forming lines, and my limited experience has definitely shown this to be the case.

Anyway, a few rambling impressions. The first thing most Mongolians I have spoken with say is "are you planning to get to the countryside?" which I do hope and plan to do. I am really excited to have so much more time to explore here and outside UB insofar as possible, but also already realizing that three weeks is not even enough to scratch the surface here.

2010-07-04T13:40:00.004-04:00

I am in Mongolia after 25.5 hours travel time from Washington DC, all of which was remarkably easy actually if you leave aside the 25.5 hours part of it. On the flight to Beijing I ended up sitting next to a musicologist on her way to a Fulbright year in Beijing, so the conversation was very interesting coming over.

Arriving in UB was pretty easy. Amazingly dark flight over the country until you reach the city. It definitely helps when someone picks you up here, which took the only potentially stressful part out of the trip I think. Flights into Ulaanbaatar land at near midnight so I did kind of wonder how it was all going to work. I drove through the city but it is pretty dark and I couldn't see much. I am staying at a Communist era hotel which has all of the charms of a Communist era hotel but it is clean and cheap and right in the city center, and has free internet.

I had six hours in the Beijing airport, which is appropriately massive and cool, with a nice green roof that I took some pictures of and will post sometime, although not air conditioned and pretty hot. I am carrying an instrument, which is a good conversation starter as usual, and it led a traveling businessman and guitar player English-named 'Erik' (actual name Lee Wei) who had travelled to Sweden and Norway to sell brass couplings and was on his way back to strike up a conversation. What he really loved was Guns n Roses. We talked about them for a long time, while he insisted I drink beer with him.

He then asked me a great question "what is liberty?" He said "we don't have liberty in China." Mostly he meant liberty to buy rock and roll cds and a Harley Davidson.

I will admit that I thought it was a little bit too perfect that someone was asking me to define liberty in my first conversation in China. But it is hard to complain if someone wants to buy you a beer on July 4 in the Beijing airport and talk about Guns n Roses and the concept of liberty.

I get my apartment tomorrow, have a talk to give on sustainability theory and traditional music on Tuesday, and thereafter get to enjoy the reality that I am in Mongolia. I will post when I can.

My talk, incidentally, is at the "red ger" in the Zanabazar Art museum. My first lecture in a ger, hopefully not my last.

2010-06-22T12:56:00.003-04:00

I was fortunate enough on Friday to get to see Los Tigres del Norte play in Richmond and, through the graciousness and generosity of Gilbert Reyes of Hohner accordions and the invaluable Reyes Forum, got to see it standing in the backstage area where I had an unimpeded view of the stage and great sound too. It was really a lot of fun.

Like a fool I forgot my camera.

The soundsystem was so insanely loud--as Norteño shows almost always are-- that standing on the side made it just overpowering rather than deafening.

The music sounded good and the band was really tight. Los Tigres are such pros that they were really a marvel to watch them perform. I've seen them before a few years ago, but I was far off in the back of a large outdoor rodeo concert in Manassas. Standing just behind the sound man really gave me an appreciation for how tightly they ran the show, with roadies handing off instruments in highly choreographed maneuvers and virtually no break between songs for hours. Eduardo (bajo/sax/accordion) would switch instruments with the help of two techs handing off one instrument while grabbing another at the same time and then turning to start a song. Occasionally the band did stop to read the little pieces of paper handed over the fence to the band. I was on the side of the stage so people handed them to me, I handed them to the crew, who handed them to band.

Every once in a while someone would jump on stage and give every band member a hug. They never broke their smiles, stopped playing, or missed a beat. And didn't even look especially irritated. Most American bands who have sold millions of records would have roadies beating the interlopers senseless. Los Tigres accepted each fan's love with grace and cool.

After the concert Los Tigres stood and took pictures with fans for hours, smiling for all of them and supplying polaroids for those who did not have cameras. I sat and watched but left shortly after 3 in the morning, with a long line still formed and the band smiling away for all of them like each picture was fresh. That kind of respect for fans was really something.

2010-06-22T12:54:00.003-04:00

A couple of pics of Lark this summer so far:

2010-06-21T22:50:00.005-04:00

Between dealing with the aftermath of my accident, editing my book, spending a great week at the Tocqueville Institute at the University of Richmond, and preparing to go to Mongolia, Nunal has definitely suffered for attention.

The days before I leave are going to be nuts as I go to Chicago to see my folks and help my dad split a beehive, to Madison for the SHAFR conference (and as an added bonus to see old good friends and play some music), and then to New Orleans for a rapidfire bender with a friend of mine turning 40 who runs bars there...all before leaving for Ulanbaatar in a week and a half.

Somehow it is all going to happen I know, but it ain't going to be pretty.

I'll leave you for the time being with this description of possible annoyances in Mongolia. It invites some interesting speculation. I also like the suggestion of how to recognize drunks:

"Being out late at night is not advisable, especially if you are alone. Avoid ger districts and other poorly lit areas. Take a torch with you. Use a proper taxi if you can find one. Vodka may be a popular drink in Mongolia which used in many celebrations, but it is also the source of a big alcohol problem. The problems are more serious in Ulaanbaatar and the aimag centres than in the countryside. Drunks tend to me more of an annoyance than a danger. Drunks are easily recognised by a stumbling walk. They tend to be on their own rather than in large groups. If you are approached by a drunk, try to walk away. If they follow, try running - they're unlikely to catch up with you if they've had a lot to drink. If you can find a policeman, all the better. Experience has shown that they are very tough on drunks annoying or threatening foreigners, although the immediate punishment may be something you're not used to."

saving the wild hives

2010-06-01T22:30:00.004-04:00

This is a cool project: an attempt to map feral bee colonies by something called the Feral Bee Project. Feral bees have been surviving without intervention from people and so may indeed hold some critical secrets for survivability. "Feral" in this sense means not managed by a beekeeper. It does not mean they are any meaner or wilder.

If you are wondering how to find one, there are some beelining tips on the page too.

I definitely hold to the theory that the feral colonies hold the secret to the future of bee survival. It is one reason I like to get swarms as much as possible. Ialso have four of my hives that I have never done anything to and VERY rarely even inspect, maybe once or a few times a year. They have thrived, made honey, and requeened themselves year after year, six years running. No chemicals at all, no medications, nothing except some very occasional powdered sugar dusted on them. I use these strong hives as sources for nucs and propagate these queens since clearly they have figured out how to survive. They are likely mating with some feral drones and that is a huge advantage.

Diversions for the weekend

2010-05-28T09:55:00.003-04:00

"Germans are stealing more beehives" sounds like it could be a headline from the Onion, but it is real.

"Caught in the Act

Over the past few years, the Apicultural State Institute at Hohenheim University in Stuttgart, which specializes in agricultural studies, has had 72 bee colonies stolen from various locations. And in Bavaria, a honey producer even stole queen bees from his own beekeeping collective.

This spring the Apicultural State Institute set three camera traps -- shortly afterwards the cameras caught a 71-year-old, hobby beekeeper from Nürtingen in the state of Baden-Württemberg, in the act of bee abduction.

To counter the increasing bee thievery, some apiarists have installed GPS devices in their hives so that they can track the colonies' whereabouts online, in case of theft. Others have taken to using honeycombs in unique sizes so that their bees cannot be so easily placed into other hives."

"to protect and serve"

2010-05-26T00:11:00.010-04:00

I spent the weekend working on my project on Mexicanization of social spaces in North Carolina, which was both enormously interesting and a lot of fun (more about it later in depth and with illustrations, when I can collect my thoughts).

As I was driving back home I was lucky not to get killed when a fleeing thief slammed his car into my truck at high speed. He was being chased by the heroic Norfolk police following a break-in at a state ABC liquor store several miles away. Like most if not all high speed police chases, this one ended with a crash into some unlucky soul, which was me.

I didn't really have time to react, it happened so quickly. As the car came out of a side street faster than I could do anything but think "what the fuck, this guy is coming so fast!!!" I found myself crashed on the other side of the street facing the wrong way with my front end smashed, air bag blown and my truck cab filled with smoke. I have no memory of the time between the impact and the end of it, no sound, no image. I keep thinking about that moment of being crashed looking at the airbag. Luckily a car wasn't coming the other way or the whole thing could have been truly catastrophic.

Off to my right the policemen all jumped out of their cars with guns drawn. This is a sight I have seen two other times in Norfolk, but never from this particular vantage point of a smashed vehicle. God, I hate Norfolk. But I digress.

So the cops all had their guns drawn and and yelled at the liquor store thief not to move and the whole police thing. I am sure they were all thrilled to pieces to have been in a real live chase with guns drawn! In any case, the dude wasn't in shape to move, he was injured and his car had flipped over.

Within seconds there were at least a half dozen more police cars on the scene. Nobody, not a single cop, came to my aid until I started raising my voice at them demanding that someone deal with the situation. A female officer told me to watch it and walked off. Another did come to talk to me at least, and one particularly friendly one made a call for me to Skye, who was expecting me home and heard the sirens since this was less than a half mile from home.

Keep in mind that I am a taxpaying citizen of Norfolk who was a victim of an accident caused by the police. They showed almost no concern for what happened. Period. I received almost no information from the police, no apologies for this accident, extraordinary little sympathy, and almost no assistance.

Here is the TV video report. They toned it down from the initial reporting, which is to say they mostly cut my story out of it. The original report mentioned that I went to the hospital, this story below the video no longer does. It makes it seem like the truck was empty.

It is worth noting that no reporter ever contacted me to ask what happened. It is no surprise that local reporting is basically just an announcement of the police blotter, but it is pretty sad.

Actually, no cop asked me anything either. If you dent a bumper you have to fill out a police report. In this case, I kept having to interrupt a group of three cops standing around yuking it up to ask what the hell was going on and see what was to happen to me. As it was, I was taken to the hospital and then later released.

Here are some more pictures I took right before I was left. I wish I had had the wherewithal to take more when I was sitting around shivering on the sidewalk, but I was really shaken up and out of it and then later the EMTs were asking me to get in the ambulance. If you look in the back of this photo you can see the three officers standing shooting the breeze.

Luckily I had a big truck and wasn't going faster. If he had hit me broadside it probably would have flipped it considering how fast he must have been going.

Is there a more two-bit crime then knocking off a liquor store? Sure this guy was a bozo (assuming he actually did the crime) but the responsibility here clearly lies with the police.

What in the hell are the police doing pursuing a small property crime at high speed while endangering the lives of anyone unfortunate enough to be in the path of the chase? As it is I am injured and my truck is smashed, lucky nobody else is dead, paralyzed, or wounded.

Here is the epilogue to this overall disaster which perfectly illustrates the character of the Norfolk police department. When I was discharged from the hospital I asked some of the cops standing around to drive me home. After some reluctance, they agreed, but told me I would have to be patted down for weapons.

Ok, maybe this is department policy, I don't actually mind. But there are ways to do things that do not require mistreating people and there are other ways that reveal the attitude of disdain. The very large cop (much bigger than me and I am 6'3") who searched me felt compelled to grab my hands behind my back, twist them together and then up in an incapacitating way that meant I could not move, and then searched me for weapons. Was this little humiliation actually necessary? I can't imagine it was, but I am sure it made the cop feel tough.

Keep in mind that I was not being picked up for something, I was just the unlucky person who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, injured with a destroyed vehicle courtesy of the run amok police.

All class, the Norfolk police.

2010-05-20T22:21:00.005-04:00

It goes without saying that it is difficult for historians to get published...and they have to endure an execrable job market...blah blah blah.

But I must ask, how is it possible (or even a teeny bit just) for an utterly disgraced historian like Michael Bellesiles, who lost his tenured position, had his Bancroft Prize yanked (Columbia found "After considering all of these materials, the Trustees concurred with the three distinguished scholars who reviewed the case for Emory University that Professor Bellesiles had violated basic norms of acceptable scholarly conduct"), and lost the profession's respect because his book was an invention and an insult to scholarship, not only secure another job (albeit an adjunct slot at some provincial Connecticut campus) but also get another book out? While, it is pedantic to point out, the best minds of this generation are [destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked] out there serving fries while endlessly being not published somewhere? It is simply dismaying.

I use the Bellesiles case every year as exhibit A in discussions of academic dishonesty and will continue to do so.

In more amusing matters, and speaking of academic cheats, I have now caught at least one plariarizer each semester for a year (including Winter Session) because they simply copy and pasted from Wikipedia without removing the hyperlinks. Boneheaded, to say the least.

At least Bellesiles just made the stuff up--- and then later claimed his notes were destroyed in a flood. Marginally more creative than the usual excuse cheats offer up.

My favorite is the perennial "my cousin" assembled the material for me. Maybe Bellesiles should peddle the cousin angle.

"Hip hop originated in Mongolia”

2010-05-10T21:45:00.003-04:00

Exploring musical culture and contemporary music making in Mongolia is going to be really fascinating and significantly more diverse than the just a search for traditional music making, that much is clear.

Check out this trailer for a forthcoming documentary about Mongolian hiphop called Mongolian Bling. I really can't wait to see the rest of the film and, hopefully, to catch some of these musicians and bands live.

The film is worth it if only for the quote above and interview (briefly excerpted in the clip). Perfect!

There were quite a few of the hybrid hip hop-traditional bands (such as appear towards the end of the clip) in Korea, way more interesting stuff and unexpected to study than just the hiphop performers playing purely in the style, at least to my mind.

My feeling watching this is something like that I had when I initially sought out "traditional" Mexican musicians migrating to North Carolina and Virginia and kept running into people who were everything but, like the bajo sexto player in Washington, N.C. who just wanted to play Led Zeppelin. Or the Mexican metal band in Roanoke, Los Wetbacks. For I time I kept wrongheadingly looking for the old timey players until suddenly (or finally) realized that these other forms were actually key. I still prefer the traditional stuff for listening and playing of course, but I no longer seeking the 'salvage anthropology' (as the description goes...)

2010-04-27T23:42:00.004-04:00

We got stuck in New York for a day traveling back. Here is Miss Lark looking impossibly but typically cute at a restaurant.

2010-04-27T23:36:00.002-04:00

Korean beekeepers have been having some problems, with 30% losses. This is approximately where the U.S. losses are each winter.

This article indicates that they make much of their money from honey rather than pollination, which is exactly opposite the case here.

2010-04-23T08:25:00.001-04:00

This is a great point--here is hoping someone still actually reads Slate...

"We're already sending our clean-energy tech to China, and intellectual property law has nothing to do with it."

"Economic theory states that technology innovation comes from the private sector, and that when the states attempt to get involved they tend to "crowd out"—scare off, or out-compete—private firms, which are by definition more efficient than big, dumb governments. Government attempts at energy tech innovation are considered a joke. Exhibit A is the SynFuels coal-to-liquid fuels program of the 1970s, started in response to oil price shocks and widely viewed as a government boondoggle. Governments shouldn't pick technology winners and losers, say liberals and conservatives alike. It fails every time.

But the actual economy has a funny way of undermining economic theory. Call it creative disruption. The financial crash of 2008 was created by Wall Street firms, not governments. It thus obliterated the neoliberal chestnut that markets are self-regulating. Now China's green leap forward reaffirms the fact that that states enable and fund private firms to innovate. Instead of crowding out private investments, China is crowding them inside its borders. Last year, China attracted $34.6 billion in private clean tech capital, twice as much as flowed into the United States.

None of this should surprise us. China is simply doing what every other nation in human history has done, which is to guarantee its citizens and businesses access to reliable sources of energy, the metabolism for the entire economy. The U.S. government built hydro-electric dams during the early decades of the 20th century, opening up the West for major new cities and energy-intensive industries like aluminum manufacturing in Washington state. Nuclear plants were next, and, though over-hyped at the time, they still provide 20 percent of America's electricity. Solar panels and large wind turbines were invented here and further advanced by the U.S. space program; recent improvements have come from Japanese, German, Spanish, and now Chinese governments.

Beyond energy, the U.S. government picked such technological losers as the railroads, telegraphs, telephones, jet engines, microchips, the Internet, cell phones, x-rays, radars—the list goes on and on. Even private labs that justly received a lot of credit for innovation, like Xerox PARC and Bell Labs, were heavily funded by the U.S. government.

As for that dreaded SynFuels boondoggle, it turns out the program did what Congress asked it to do—produce liquid fuels for $60 a barrel. The reason it was canceled was that the price of oil had dropped to $10 a barrel. And the gasification technologies that were developed along the way were eventually used to suck oil out of nearly depleted wells, and for carbon capture and storage.

In light of all this, the obsession with patent laws and other regulatory measures is a distraction. There is no need to change the U.S. intellectual-property regime or to modify intellectual-property laws in other countries. Firms that want to move to China will continue to do so, making their own agreements for technology transfer as they see necessary.

In the end, the greatest barrier to a much needed energy technology revolution is neither patent law nor the absence of a global climate treaty but, rather, a kind of collective amnesia born of a single-minded neoliberal orthodoxy. Americans have largely forgotten the role of public support in our development. We look at our dams and imagine they were built by private utilities. We credit Google and Apple with the global communications revolution without any awareness that they would not exist had the government not spent billions on microchips, computer-science scholarships, and that white elephant invented in a government laboratory, the Internet.

Greens convinced themselves they solved acid rain by passing cap-and-trade for sulfur dioxide, which led to innovation in clean-air technologies. In truth, smokestack scrubbers and low-sulfur coal made the legislation possible in the first place. Libertarian conservatives, for their part, tell fanciful inventor-as-hero stories, where great men like Hewlett, Gates, Jobs, and the Google guys received no help from the government. In truth, none could have done what they did without direct government assistance in the form of electrification, military procurement, science education, and multi-decadal R & D investments.

If the world does anything about climate change, it will look a lot more like what the Chinese government and Western energy technology firms have been doing in practice and less like what liberals and conservatives in the West have been proposing since the late 1980s. The nation that leads in these sectors will be those nations that provide private firms with the necessary conditions for innovation—big laboratories, R & D centers, Ph.D. scientists, engineers, and government demonstration contracts. In exchange, private firms recognize that some of their intellectual property will spill over in the same way that Silicon Valley firms borrow or steal from each other (depending on your point of view).

Though it is easy to lapse into an end-of-empire narrative, America regularly remakes itself in the face of foreign competition, from the Russians in the 1950s to the Japanese in the 1980s. There are reasons to be hopeful. Recognizing the role of innovation for economic growth, President Obama increased his request for federal R & D funding. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, who also used to work at Bell Labs, is lobbying Congress for greater funding for science and education. There's still time, it seems, for the United States to participate in the clean energy race. Let's just hope we don't have to wait for the end of neoliberal economic orthodoxy for it to happen."

Mongolia is Calling Me

2010-04-15T10:44:00.004-04:00

Words cannot accurately capture how thrilled I am to learn that I received a grant from the American Center for Mongolian Studies to go to Mongolia this summer to study Mongolian traditional music making and issues of intangible cultural heritage.

Those of you who have known me for a while will know of my interest in Mongolian music, not just the throat singing but also the horse-headed fiddle as well (morin khuur). To have the opportunity to actually go there is so riveting I am truly having difficulty thinking about anything else. Incredible.

When I first heard of the grant I looked at the page and there was a caption that read "Mongolia is calling you." Truer words have never been spoken.

2010-04-15T10:37:00.003-04:00

One of my colleagues at VWC is from New York, with an accent thick enough to cut glass. But I think the most telling New York characteristic was his truly endearing need to look up the yellow flowers that had popped up all over his new Virginia Beach lawn. Thanks to Google he managed to discover just what they were--dandelions. Apparently his neighbors were not thrilled they were marring the green expanse. Apparently they don't know you can eat every part of them.

I was reminded of this earlier today when a guy stopped by the house and when I opened the door he said "I was wondering about your lawn." I looked at him, and at the lawn (which was grazing his knees), and amused myself by responding "what do you mean?" For some reason he thought I would want to have it cut. Nope, I prefer my gasless mower which pushes the grass over long enough for me to pretend it was cut, allowing it to spring healthily back in place, high enough to give small mammals a place to hide but not enough to give my neighbors pause. I live in Nofolk, after all, not Virginia Beach.

oh, THAT slavery

2010-04-08T12:23:00.003-04:00

Now that McDonnell has reversed himself it is time to marvel how politically tone deaf he seems to be. The same trajectory of dumb move followed by retreat happened when he ended the anti-discrimination laws in state institutions particularly directed against gays, and then reversed himself as the AG goosestepped forward. This way he not only has totally lost any credibility with all Virginians not on the hard right, he also loses whatever favor he was hoping to curry with the far right.

Bad politics, no matter how you slice it.

Virginia is for lovers...of the Confederacy

2010-04-07T12:46:00.002-04:00

Governor McDonnell may be a lot of things, but historically minded, classy, smart, or sensitive ain't among them.

Choosing to officially recognize Confederate History Month, he also choose to adopt the silliest and most offensive interpretation of the meaning of the month.

"The two previous Democratic governors had refused to issue the mostly symbolic proclamation honoring the soldiers who fought for the South in the Civil War. McDonnell (R) revived a practice started by Republican governor George Allen in 1997. McDonnell left out anti-slavery language that Allen's successor, James S. Gilmore III (R), had included in his proclamation.

McDonnell said Tuesday that the move was designed to promote tourism in the state, which next year will mark the 150th anniversary of the start of the war. McDonnell said he did not include a reference to slavery because "there were any number of aspects to that conflict between the states. Obviously, it involved slavery. It involved other issues. But I focused on the ones I thought were most significant for Virginia."
...The seven-paragraph declaration calls for Virginians to "understand the sacrifices of the Confederate leaders, soldiers and citizens during the period of the Civil War." "

I wish the governor had detailed which "aspects" of the Civil War that were "most significant" for Virginia other than slavery, its primary cause?

It is fitting that McDonnell is making retrograde efforts at the same time that the Virginia AG Ken Cuccinelli is waging a holy war against health care reform built on reviving state nullification.

I am sure George Allen is pleased to read this...as he putters around his house as an early retiree in dirty slippers. McDonnell and Cuccinelli will be joining him soon.

2010-04-07T12:44:00.001-04:00

In the high 80s all week really makes the summer seem imminent.

2010-04-07T11:38:00.006-04:00

I was in St Louis over the weekend, at the Popular Culture/American Culture Association conference accepting the Carl Bode award for my article on Mexican musicians in the contemporary Southeast. I was definitely pretty happy about winning that award, it's obviously nice to be recognized -- and especially so for something as interesting as research on Mexican music. here I am collecting the prize:

Being in St Louis gave me a chance to go to Cahokia for the first time. I used to travel to St Louis once a year but spent most of my time at the annual polka festival. Somehow never made it to Cahokia.

here is the large monk mound, it is actually much higher than it looks in this photo:

here is the view from the top, that is St. Louis in the background.

Cahokia is east of St Louis in a part of Illinois not known for this its prosperity nowadays (to say the least). At the historic site, just beyond a gargantuan tree, stands a trailer park that is current Mississippian Culture.

I was interested to see that we passed a number of taquerias on the way to the mounds but I never got a picture of one.

I went with a friend who is also a musician and we played tunes sitting out in the picnic area near the mounds, next to a large field where some horses were being ridden, all in all a perfect place to play some tunes.

Sic Semper Tyrannis

2010-03-23T00:52:00.004-04:00

As the right continues to froth about the mouth over the threat of poor Americans having health care, it is instructive to read some reasoned legal opinion about the sheer fatuousness of the right's case to use the courts to kill the plan (see Balkin's sharp "If you can't stop the bill, just have another Bush v. Gore."

Also interesting are the roots of the health plan in "RomneyCare" and the Heritage Foundation

The Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli II (yes, the same moralistic AG who ordered Virginia's public universities and colleges to rescind policies that banned discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation) is going to sue to stop the tyranny of us all having to buy health insurance.

No doubt this means that the Commonwealth will soon stop the tyrannical state abuse of power which forces us all to buy car insurance. Sic Semper Tyrannis

South Carolina is apparently also threatening to pursue a legal remedy to this out break of majority rule. This means some good political theatre. After all, the last time the state right wingers postured in South Carolina in this way was that little episode when ol' Governor Sanford categorically refused to take one thin dime of federal bailout funds but soon ended up in Argentina in the arms of his soulmate.

more bad news for bees

2010-03-22T21:09:00.002-04:00

The American Chemical Society is not shying away from the fact that chemicals in hives are devastating bee populations, both in the pollen and the wax, a new study is detailing exactly what is going on:

"In it, Christopher Mullin of Pennsylvania State University in University Park and his colleagues describe widespread pesticide tainting in 749 samples of bee-dom, some of those chemicals at levels that would be toxic if they occurred alone. Except that most bees aren’t exposed to just a single pesticide.

In beeswax, they report, “87 pesticides and metabolites were found with up to 39 different detections in a single sample.” The average number of pesticides identified per wax sample (and they analyzed 259 samples): eight. Among 350 pollen samples retrieved from hives, each harbored an average of seven such chemicals – but at times up to 31 pesticide contaminants (or their breakdown products, some of which are far more toxic to bees than the parent chemical would have been)."

the real problem is actually from the chemicals used to treat for mites:

"In general, the most commonly occurring pesticides were those that may have been intentionally applied to hives in hopes of killing mites, a bee parasite. However, some of these miticides may, when paired up with other classes of pesticides, act synergistically to poison insects. The top 10 most frequently found pesticidal chemicals: fluvalinate and coumaphos – both mite killers -- followed by chlorpyrifos, chlorothalonil, amitraz (another miticide), pendamethalin, endosulfan, fenpropathrin, esfenvalerate and atrazine – the last an herbicide.

Overall, mite-killing chemicals accounted for most pesticide residues in comb wax and bees. Fungicides dominated the pollen contamination

In some instances, the researchers note, “unprecedented” parts-per-million levels of individual chemicals were found. And the real problem, Mullins’ group argues, is that “the biological impacts of these materials at their dietary levels on other honey bee larvae or adults remains to be determined.” "

It doesn't seem hard to imagine then that not using miticides will take beekeepers a long way (though not all the way) to solving the problem. The heavy chemical dependence of U.S. agriculture simply is not a sustainable system.

the citation is: Mullin, C.A., et al. 2010. High Levels of Miticides and Agrochemicals in North American Apiaries: Implications for Honey Bee Health. PLoS ONE 5(March):e9754.

2010-03-18T23:31:00.002-04:00

Check out this series of pictures of Juárez from the Washington Post. The picture of Colonia Fronteriza seems more telling than the ones of corpses.

snapshots of the state of things

2010-03-18T23:14:00.003-04:00

You can skip this post if you are going to claim that you don't want to hear some random charming stories about the evervescent and incredibly brilliant Miss Lark.

She always has something interesting to say, really it is a daily pleasure.

Looking at some lions at the zoo as they snoozed I said (in that apparently inescapable parental way) 'what are the lions doing?' I was thinking "napping" or maybe "sleeping." Her response: "basking in the sun." Basking, nice.

Today as we were driving she asked me to play Ralph Stanley's "Bound to Ride." I put the cd in and then accidentally put it on the wrong song. Lark said within the first measure: "That isn't 'Bound to Ride,' that's 'Rocky Island.'" Not bad. Especially considering all of that music sounds the same...

And speaking of music that all sounds the same, today during dinner she requested Mexican music (or however it is she pronounces "music," it sounds something like "musiktc". I help up a Flaco Jiminez record and said "how about this one." Her response: that's not Mexican music." True, it is at least once removed. We settled on Los Alegres de Teran, firmly south of the border and so popular in Mexico that legend holds that all the village dogs could sing their songs.

Outrage

2010-03-17T21:41:00.003-04:00

The killing of the U.S. consulate workers in Ciudad Juárez gave U.S. officials a chance to dust off some time worn language that gets evoked often in borderland issues--it was an "outrage."

This was how Obama was quoted in the AP story and elsewhere, for some reason the NYTimes did not run that quote. And outrage is all over the place. "President Felipe Calderon, Foreign Relations Secretary Patricia Espinosa and U.S. Ambassador Carlos Pascual flew together to Ciudad Juarez to express their outrage on Tuesday."

Not that these killings were anything but completely outrageous. They were insane, totally reprehensible and evil, especially given the proximity of infants and little children.

"The wife of one of the victims, a 13-year employee of the consulate named Hilda, described to a friend how she watched in horror as hit men pumped bullets into her SUV with her husband and children inside. She had been trailing her family in a second car when the attack occurred.

She leapt screaming from her car, begging the men to stop and telling them her children—ages 2, 4 and 7—were inside, the friend said. But they continued until her husband, Jorge Alberto Salcido, was covered in blood, slumped dead behind the steering wheel.

All three children in the car were treated for injuries and released—the older children grazed by bullets and the youngest hit by shards of glass, the friend said. His account differed from authorities who said two children were in the car. "

One of the consulate workers killed had the job of "helping U.S. citizens recover the remains of loved ones who had died in Mexico."

Nevertheless the official expressions of outrage can't be read unproblematically given the language of "outrage" that larded the relations since the 1870s at least. (Outrage so thoroughly lards the documents I even used the word for a chapter title.)

"Outrage" is usually used only to refer to specific acts affecting Americans. The same muderous acts, say by U.S.-taxpayer financed Blackwater security guards killing innocent Iraqi civilians for no reason (to pick an example out of the blue), are usually called "accidents" if even called anything before being dismissed from courts.

True outrage, or even the language of such outrage, has been pretty quiet despite the literal bloodbath going on on our border as a result of our insatiable desire for drugs and our decades-long failed interdiction strategy. Yes, the outrage is that the U.S. is the cause of the drug violence but cares not until something disgusting and tragic happens to Americans. But it is almost certain that by the end of the week there will be an equally horrible slaying that will make no ripples in the public consciousness.

These killings are as twisted as every other killing in Juárez, which is out of control. 500 killings so far this year, and it is mid-March. Maybe now that Homeland Security has pulled the plug on the border wall and there is this explosion of states rights movements across the country some sanity will creep into the 'drug war" and undercut the whole reason for the slaughter going on.

P.S. That American consulate in Juárez is a really inviting looking place, isn't it:

2010-03-17T11:16:00.009-04:00

Spring is finally here and I have had a chance to visit all of my bees. All of them are doing extremely well, which is heartening since I am now 5 years chemical free and this is a tough row to hoe. But a critical one and worth every effort.

This picture is from a hive in Pungo. On the bees on the comb you can see them packing away at least three different pollens. IN the other one if you look closely you can see them bringing it it. Check out the bright red pollen they are pulling in and the yellow/orange in the middle, and then the whitish pollen on the bee at the top.

Some of the hives are actually extremely big and extremely active and extremely defensive--which is the nice beekeeper way of saying extremely mean. But there is sometimes a correlation between mean bees and honey production, the key is to keep a balance since it is no fun to keep mean bees. I'll requeen them and settle them down.

here is how things look in Suffolk at the moment. You'll notice that nice little access the farmer made sure I had over the ditch. Beats the old days, when I had to jump the ditch holding a 40 pound super.

Actually they may have been mean since there was a lot of mouse activity down in Suffolk. One of the hives had three mice living in the bottom super. This isn't unusual, since mice like the warm hives, it is always a struggle to keep them out. As the cluster of bees move up the mice snuggle down in the bottom. They do make a mess and destroy the comb. Sometimes you find a little mouse the bees have managed to kill propolized to the bottom board. These little bastards were surprised when I opened up the hive. Here one is when I turned it upside down:

He went scampering. I found two more as I pulled out the nest. This was actually a small one, just down in the corner. This is brood comb so the bees don't really mind, they'll fix it and move on.

Thankfully the mice never get into the honey supers. Especially since as the bloom gets on the bees are very strong and a mouse would be suicidal to enter a hive. And there are plenty of nice places for mice to live in Suffolk...

2010-03-17T11:06:00.005-04:00

Some photos of the Lil Buddha from the weekend at a local playground. She looks characteristically darling of course but the angle is unfortunate. I sent one of these first two to a friend of mine and he said "Where do you take her to play, a parking ramp?"

local idiot watch

2010-03-17T11:02:00.002-04:00

The foolish movie reviewer in the local paper (Mal Vincent) wrote a review of the Green Zone that stated at the beginning that there was no difference between being anti-American policy in Iraq and being anti-American. Uh, what?

(though a friend at work noted that I am about the only sub-60 year old person who reads the paper)

2010-03-10T10:17:00.002-05:00

This is an interesting study about the impact of pyrethroid pesticides on honeybee fertility. Rather than just flat wiping out bees, these supposedly green pesticides are slowly destroying the queen laying numbers and egg success. So you can soak the bees in the chemical and it is fine, but the real impact is on laying. Beekeepers who have witnesssed the much higher failure rate of queens these days will be especially interested.

"After first establishing the dose that would kill no more than five percent of exposed bees, the researchers laced sugar water near bee hives with either of the pyrethroids at that tolerable dose. Worker bees had access for 20 days to the pseudo-nectar in each of three successive years. Queens in each colony were dosed every five days over each treatment period. Studied bees had no access to outside nectar during the trial periods.

Compared to queens receiving clean sugar water, those in the pyrethroid groups were substantially less fecund. For instance, clean queens in 2006 laid a little more than 1,200 eggs each day, compared to not quite 900 a day in the bifenthrin group and roughly 600 per day in the deltamethrin group. In general, the weight of eggs laid was higher in the pyrethroid-treated hives, but the hatch rate of pyrethroid-exposed eggs was significantly depressed. It varied by year, but in 2008, for instance, 88 percent of eggs in the control hives hatched versus 71.4 percent of those in the bifenthrin-treated hives and 80.5 percent of the deltamethrin-treated bees.

The success rate of hatchlings, that is the share that reached adulthood, varied from 75 to 95 percent in the control hive – making it between 20 and 40 percentage points higher than in hives where bees had been exposed to a pyrethroid. Dai and colleagues report their findings in the March Environmental Toxicology & Chemistry.

The bottom line, Dai’s team concludes: “The impact of pesticides on the colony may be severe.” "

Interesting the study is from China, where the beekeeping industry is no stranger to chemicals...

2010-02-26T00:38:00.002-05:00

A handful of keys have been wiped off on my keyboard. This isn't a big deal since I can type, but it did make using passwords unusually hazardous. It cost me four bucks to get little letter stickers with letters on them so I can see the letters.

Thinking there might be a pattern to the letters, I fed them into a word generator and here is what it produced:

martens, sarment, smarten, aments, armets, mantes, marten, master, maters, matres, namers, ramets, remans, stamen, stream, tamers, amens, ament, armet, manes, manse, mares, marse, marts, maser, mater, mates, means, meant, meats, mensa, menta, namer, names, nemas, ramen, ramet, reams, reman, satem, smart, smear, steam, tamer, tames, teams, terms, trams, amen, antres, arms, astern, maes, mane, mans, mare, mars, mart, mast, mate, mats, mean, meat, mesa, meta, name, nema, rams, ream, rems, same, seam, stem, sterna, tame, tams, team, term, tram, antes, antre, arm, aster, earns, ems, etnas, mae, man, mar, mas, mat, men, met, nam, nares, nates, nears, neats, nerts, ram, rants, rates, rem, rents, resat, saner, snare, stane, stare, stern, tam, tares, tarns, tears, terns, trans, am, anes, ante, ants, ares, arts, ates, earn, ears, east, eats, em, eras, erns, erst, etas, etna, ma, me, near, neat, nest, nets, rant, rase, rate, rats, rent, rest, rets, sane, sate, sear, seat, sent, sera, seta, star, tans, tare, tarn, tars, tear, teas, tens, tern, tres, tsar

This was an online scrabble generator so maybe these count for words or something (I have only played once), but "snare" is the one I am going with as the reason for the season.

other thoughts on writing

2010-02-25T13:36:00.003-05:00

For whatever reason, these notes on writing have been flowing my way just now.

Italo Calvino defines good writing as including "Lightness, Quickness, Exactitude, Visibility, and Multiplicity."

The best example he gives (and the source I found his list in, in the introduction to the book) is one of Augusto Monterroso's stories in Complete Works and Other Stories. (Surely one of the great titles, right there with the New Lost City Rambler's "Second Annual Farewell Concert")

The story is called "The Dinosaur", which reads in its entirety "When he awoke, the dinosaur was still there." Or maybe "When I awoke, the dinosaur was still there."

2010-02-24T22:52:00.005-05:00

I spoke with an old friend of mine the other day after a few years of being out of all but the most oblique touch (though it seemed like it had been about 5 minutes since we had last spoken) and was thinking how odd it was to catch up at such luxurious length with someone.

She agreed, but pointed out that it was in part because of facebook. Everybody apparently knows what all everybody else is doing because of facebook. I haven't seen it. This isn't from any point of principle or anti-technological sense (this is, after all, a blog) but I haven't felt the compelling need. Maybe it is the social networking concept rather than the screed-friendly platform of the blog. Or something like that.

But I gather one key point is to see photos, so here is the truly ineffable Miss Lark.

and another with Skye