Miles Runs The Voodoo Down

Registration for spring classes starts next week, and as I was perusing this Polcolonial Musicology course and other related tutorials, I came across the fascinating Dr Henkjan Honing.  Daniel Levitin mentions Honing’s research in his book, but Honing himself articulates the subject much better:

Watch this video.

I may try to sneak into a few lectures for Honing’s Music Cognition course next semester!

What I Be

As part of the world-wide protests this Saturday uniting the queer community against bigotry and hatred, my friends and I went to the Homomonument at the Westerkerk to join the organization Love Exiles in solidarity.

Click here for a great video

Love Exiles member Martha McDevitt-Pugh (the one interviewed in the above video) places the group’s activim this way:

Here in the Netherlands and other countries that respect the right of all loving couples to live together legally and in peace, are many thousands of US citizens who have left their homes to be with foreign same-sex partners. No doubt you know someone who is a “love exile”.  Ask any gay or lesbian American why they are here. For many if not most, it’s because they can’t sponsor their partner for a green card.

Love a foreigner, leave the country, has been the reality for gays and lesbians throughout the Bush years.

Great message, and it was wonderful to be a part of what’s changing in America even if I live a couple thousand miles away from it.

Pussies for love!

Eliza’s dutchification

Country Leaver

Okay, so I don’t want a lot of television, but one show I’ll definitely watch if I happen to catch it is Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations at the Travel Channel.  I just love his personality.  He says fuck a lot, smokes like a chimney, drinks like he’s Irish, and has an everything-goes adventurous spirit about him.  All that, and he absolutely detests karaoke, which is probably a smart rule for one to have.

I was flipping through his website the other day looking for anything Tony might have to offer about Amsterdam, and found a video two brothers had made trying to get Tony to do an episode in Holland.  And OH MAN are these brothers hot.  Enjoy!

D.A.N.C.E.

I just found out this morning I was accepted to the Cultural Analysis research master’s program at the Universiteit van Amsterdam!  It’s been two years since I was last in Amsterdam, and I’ve been trying to get back there ever since; now I’ll be living there for the next two years!

So what is Cultural Analysis and why the heck am I going to the Netherlands for grad school?  Well the program is an incredibly interdisciplinary adventure that studies and creates inquiries into several phenomena surrounding the production and circulation of contemporary culture using objects and artifacts (in the broadest sense) as a point of departure.  More specifically, the faculty encourages students to

analyze cultural phenomena – such as social systems of belief and value, works of art and literature, film and the new media – and their conceptual underpinnings as well as their aesthetic and social-material structures. We emphasize textual, visual and historical details and also the implied normativity and the ways in which identity, difference and otherness are negotiated across the various media.