Revolution on a Stick Welcome Guest | Login or Register

Several people (including many blog-less friends not linked here) have asked me about the Crossroads in Cultural Studies conference in Kingston, Jamaica that wrapped up early last week.  And I would be hard-pressed to do better than Melissa Gregg’s summary of the event . . . except, perhaps, to simply say to all those people who wanted to know how it went: You should’ve been there.

I know, of course, that there are lots of good reasons why people don’t make it to conferences.  Not enough time.  Not enough money.  Competing obligations.  The simple need/desire to be a homebody for a while, especially when conferences fall during the gap between semesters.  So I don’t really blame my curious but absent friends for not making it to Jamaica.  Still:  You should’ve been there.

I have been struck by the multiple requests for reports — not just friendly “how was the conference?” queries, but an explicit desire for extended details (who was there? who gave good papers? what’s new and hot in the field? etc.) — from friends who would have fit in perfectly, who would’ve enjoyed themselves immensely, and (most tellingly) who have been to enough conferences themselves to know that even the most thorough “report” is no substitute for being there.  The feel of a conference often matters as much as (and probably more than) the actual content of the presented papers, or the roster of attendees, or a rundown of who said what to whom at the hotel bar on the final night.  So I’m not going to try and provide a detailed accounting of the who and the what of the event, ’cause even if I were to feel the muse and be graced with the most eloquent way to capture five days worth of conversations, I still couldn’t do the event justice.  You should’ve been there.

One of the things I most appreciate about the Crossroads conferences — or at least the past two renditions — is the degree to which they take their international-ness very seriously.  To be sure, they’re not some perfectly ideal space of worldly cosmopolitanism: the official language of the conference is still English, and the global South remains under-represented.  At the same time, Crossroads isn’t the sort of “international” conference where most of the usual suspects from the US, Canada, and northern Europe simply gather in a big chain hotel in some different corner of the world for a long weekend and have the same basic conversations with each other that they could/would have had at a conference back home.  For me, Crossroads somehow manages to simultaneously feel both smaller and larger than those sorts of conferences.  It’s smaller, insofar as Crossroads has a much more tight-knit, communal feel to it than a Hilton/Sheraton/Hyatt-style conference.  While it’s still a fairly large gathering, I’ve come away from the past two versions feeling like I’ve shared an experience with several hundred people — and that doesn’t happen at most other conferences I attend.  And it’s larger, insofar as the people you’re sharing that experience with represent a much broader slice of the world than is the norm for “international” conferences.

We do it all again in 2010.  In Hong Kong.

You should be there.

New York man accused
Schilling says season over
Oil rebounds on word

Doctors say Woods should
Ohio teacher burned cross
Floating foot a hoax

[background here and here and here]

I’m guessing that Amazon.com’s associational marketing algorithms could use some tweaking. ‘Cause I suspect that the Stuart Hall who’s most frequently getting linked to George Lipsitz has not started publishing books on how to play guitar . . .

Dear Amazon.com Customer,

We’ve noticed that customers who have purchased or rated books by George Lipsitz have also purchased Guitar Plan 1 and 2 by Stuart Hall.

Catching up on a backlog of unread items in my RSS reader, I came across a nice one from the Feminist Law Professor blog about “Smile on a Stick”: a “useful solution” for women who are repeatedly being told to smile by the men in their lives. The blog entry in question included the leftmost portion of the image above along with a link to the online vendor where you could buy your very own portable smile. When I saw the original post, I’ll admit that one of the first things I wondered was whether this particular novelty item came in other skintones, and I was happily surprised to see that there was at least a small range of other options available . . .

. . . until I saw the labels for them, that is. Just when did “original” become another way to say “white”? And shouldn’t people of color get to hide their expressions behind a cardboard frown too?

One week later, and there are still a handful of movies that remain unnamed. So here’s a set of “second chance” quotes (along with the previous, still unidentified quotes) for each of the remaining films.

1. Film #2 [2001: A Space Odyssey -- Bo]
   • Deliberately buried. Huh!
   • I’m afraid I can’t do that.
2. Film #4 [Citizen Kane -- Bo]
   • Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Cornell, Switzerland. He was thrown out of a lot of colleges.
   • I don’t think any word can explain a man’s life.
3. Film #7 [Dr. Strangelove -- Bo]
   • I can’t talk to you now. My president needs me!
   • Shoot, a fella could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all that stuff.
4. Film #9
   • If I’d been a ranch, they would have named me The Bar None.
   • I can never get a zipper to close. Maybe that stands for something, what do you think?

And, as always, this is for amusement purposes only. No gambling.

I was tagged with a movie quote meme. And being an agreeable fella (at least sometimes), I’m cooperating. I’ve modified the rules a bit. They look like this:

1. Pick fifteen of your favorite movies.
2. Go to IMDb and find a quote from each movie. (Or in some cases, just remember them.)
3. Post them for everyone to guess.
4. Strike out each quote when someone guesses it correctly, and append the names of the movie and the guesser.
5. No Googling/using IMDb/Wikiquote search functions. That would be cheatin’.
6. Tag ten people (I upped this from five, since I figure half my taggees won’t cooperate).

I’m tagging Anne, Gaughin, Geoff, Greg, Grrrl on the Bus, Jonathan, Mark, Mel, TAFKAB, Ted, and Timothy. [Yes, I know that's not ten. But these go to eleven. And that quote's too easy to actually use below.]

And I found I couldn’t stop at fifteen either. You can see why I gave up on that mathematics degree, eh?

1. Cute? Baby ducks are cute. I hate cute! [Bull Durham -- Timothy]
2. Deliberately buried. Huh!
3. Extra cheese is two dollars. [Do the Right Thing -- Ted]
4. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Cornell, Switzerland. He was thrown out of a lot of colleges.
5. He was my boyfriend! [Young Frankenstein -- Greg]
6. How do you shoot the devil in the back? What if you miss? [The Usual Suspects -- Ursa @ Socialism for Gunslingers]
7. I can’t talk to you now. My president needs me!
8. I haven’t been fucked like that since grade school. [Fight Club -- Ursa @ Socialism for Gunslingers]
9. If I’d been a ranch, they would have named me The Bar None.
10. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love. They had 500 years of democracy and peace. And what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. [The Third Man -- Timothy]
11. It’s only a model. [Monty Python and the Holy Grail -- Greg]
12. The poor dope. He always wanted a pool. Well, in the end, he got himself a pool. [Sunset Boulevard -- Jake]
    
13. Traffic was a bitch. [The Player -- Greg]
14. We enjoy your films. Particularly the early, funny ones. [Stardust Memories -- Timothy]
15. We were talking about automobile insurance, only you were thinking about murder. And I was thinking about that anklet. [Double Indemnity -- Greg]
16. You’d think that wiping out an entire race of people would calm ‘em down. But no. Instead, they started getting frightened of each other. [Bowling for Columbine -- Greg]
17. You’ll have to do the thinking for both of us. [Casablanca -- Timothy]

Update: For the sake of legibility, I opted to underline correctly identified quotes, rather than strike them out.

I’m in DC for a few days to visit Mom.  It’s the city where I did most of my growing up (assuming, of course, that I actually did grow up) and it’s always a little weird to come back.  There are parts of it that still feel very much like home (whatever that means) and there are an awful lot of memory triggers around town that manage to catch me by surprise when I stumble across them.  Today, for instance, I realized that a house I was driving by was not only the childhood home of a high school friend, but it was also the house where said friend gave me my first taste of marijuana.  (I can say that, yes?  The statute of limitations has long since passed.  And I’m not running for office anytime soon.)

What made this particular memory trigger so . . . surreal? (I’m not sure what the right word is here, so that’ll have to do for now) . . . was that it happened with Mom in the passenger seat.  Which wasn’t awkward because sharing tales of teenage drug use with one’s mother isn’t exactly an easy thing to do (though maybe there was a shred of that) as much as it was awkward because Mom’s got some serious memory issues of her own these days.

So while I’m experiencing a surfeit of memories from 20+ years ago, Mom’s having trouble remembering some pretty basic facts about her own life . . . and trouble remembering conversations that happened mere moments ago.  Twice during that same car ride, she asked me how old I was.  ‘Cause she couldn’t remember the answer to that question on her own — and ’cause she couldn’t remember that she’d asked the question a mere twenty minutes after I’d answered it the first time.

Perhaps there is some sort of odd “conservation of memory” principle at work here, but the juxtaposition of my mini-flood of memories with Mom’s increasingly “gappy” memory has made for a bit of a push-me/pull-you feel to my trip so far.  I don’t think this is quite what they mean when they say you can never go home again . . . but maybe it should be.

Yesterday, my car was involved in an accident.  Sort of.  It was parked on the street in front of the house at the front end of a series of three vehicles.  Someone managed to drive their car into the back rear corner of the truck at the back end of that line.  They did a serious bit of damage to their own car.  The truck, at least from what I could see from inside the house, appeared to be virtually unscathed.  But the force of the collision seemed to push it forward a notch into the car that was parked directly behind mine . . . which, in turn, was pushed forward into my rear bumper.  No one was in my car at the time.  Neither Margaret nor I talked with the police officers who showed up to handle the accident.  And if there was any real damage to my car, it’s the sort of damage that only shows up much later when one discovers that one’s rear end alignment is slightly out of whack.

Today , I received a phone call frm City Chiropractors.  The woman on the other end of the line asked for me by name.  She said that I’d been involved in an accident yesterday and wanted to know if I needed their services.  I said (in effect), “What the fuck?”

As far as I can tell, the best explanation so far (if we want to assume that Minneapolis’ Finest aren’t getting kickbacks from selling information to local businesses, anyway) is that the officer of record on the scene ran my license plate number in the course of filing his/her report . . . and then mentioned me by name in said report.  Which meant that my name showed up in the public record of the accident . . . and that trolling lawyers and chiropractors could then call me at home the next day to see if I wanted to avail myself of their services.

Yesterday, my body rebelled against me.  Or against something.  I don’t know just what I did — I didn’t actually seem to be stretching things further than was reasonable, I didn’t slip on a patch of ice, I didn’t twist my ankle and land awkwardly — but I put a serious wrench into my lower back yesterday.  The sort of thing that reminds you just how important your back is to the most basic of movements . . . because the most basic of movements suddenly hurt.  A lot.

So I wind up taking a long, hot soak in the tub.  It doesn’t cure my ailing back completely, but it’s relaxing and it feels good.  I stand up to get out of the tub . . . and my body does that woozy-dizzy-headrush thing that happens when you get up too fast.  So I lean against the wall for a moment and I kneel down again to help clear my head.  Which works.  Until I stand up again, that is, when the headrush thing comes back.

Lather.  Rinse.  Repeat.

The third or fourth time this happens, I realize that I’m also feeling nauseous.  And I have an internal debate with myself about whether it’s better to try and fight this feeling off, or if it’ll be restorative to give in to it and get it out of the way.  My body, however, decides it doesn’t need to wait for the conclusion of this debate.  So I find myself briefly enjoying the pleasures of the dry heaves.  In retrospect, it all makes perfect sense.  I’d had about four hours of non-contiguous sleep the night before.  I hadn’t eaten anything all day.  I’d just given my body a major change of temperature by climbing out of a steamy hot bath.  All a lovely recipe for a moment or three of woozy purging.

The geeky bit?  The first thing I thought of when I realized that I might be getting ready to pray at the porcelain temple was that this could be a useful way to “reboot my system.”

Anywho . . . it has been a long time since I blogged properly.  Sorry to come back with a stomach-churning post.  Better things to come soon, I hope.