an open letter to James Obrien

Indeed.

I once wrote in a song, "Any artist worth his salt just paints self-portraits anyway".

Despite its surface similarities, I don't pretend that you and I are doing the same thing. Monday I sent the first draft of my thesis off for critique from my thesis committee; I am in the end game of a Master Degree in Folk. Although I don’t know what it means in the long run, it has taught me that I don’t need to provide the answer: It’s okay just to ask the question.

I am writing a monograph of an artisan. It differs from a biography: A biography seeks to draw the art from the life, a monograph sucks the life out of the art.

It's not about folk music, not even close. In fact, I have no interest in the topic outside of this woman. Writing this thing has been a mystery, speculating, deducing, solving as I write, trying to learn what makes her tick. In doing so, what I am learning is that what interests me about her, is what I see of myself in her.

In the end, isn’t that all we ever do?

I have been wrestling with understanding the cult of the singer/songwriter. Not so much because of their ubiquity but rather their pull. So many successful artists that I regard as iconoclasts, and who are successful as such, have ultimately succumbed to the cult. I see people who were perfectly good at doing something new, now deciding to do something similar and sadly mundane.

I see this and I think, “Is this all you want to be? A solipsist?”

Then I think, “Well why? A 1,000,000 Elvis fans can’t be wrong, right?” and the question continues to turn. Days are lost. Weeks pass.

But “I have a vague notion it looks like some of the best parts of me.” Answers more than a few questions. We are both social creatures and solipsists. We need and seek out others, if merely to see ourselves in them. Picasso WAS the Minotaur. Dylan only asked questions, we love him because we think we know the answers. He’s a lot like Jeopardy in that sense.

Folklore essentially boils down to this: Boundaries and identity. I am myself, because I am not you. “Cogito ergo sum” is better said as “Ego sum non vos”.

Perhaps singer/songwriters then are the equivalent of reading a bunch of biographies and only liking the ones that sound like your life. Seems pointless, petty even, but it is the best we can do, It is how we as a society move forward. We’re kind of like Transformers in that sense, the five are more powerful than the one, or as they say in Latin: “E Pluribus Unum”

In the end, isn’t this is all we’ve ever done?

James, all you’ve ever done is ask the question. I see this book as more of that. But it’s also why I think, in the long shadows of your autumn, you’ll be able to say, “I did the best that I could.”

I look forward to reading it.

That's All Folks

So the web site is finished, the papers are posted on it and I think the time has come for the last post of the semester.

Whether or not I continue this remains to be seen, my own other blog has certainly suffered for it. But some of this stuff would go right over the heads, the rest they don't need to hear. :-)

As tangental and often unrelated as it must certainly seem, this Blog, minus perhaps the Alien-Hybrid post, was driven by genres and folk art and all those things I'm surprisingly sad to see go.
SO whether I continue to vent, or this just becomes more detris on the information superhighway, I have to say I am pleasantly surprised to find that i had to do this. so...uh thanks Chris.

'Till Next year,

-Br

It was Postmodernism, but not authentic Postmodernism.

In an effort to escape the regime of thinking, my and some friends headed over to Karl's to kill the night with Tee Vee. We watched the brilliantly pointless Aqua Teen Hunger Force (seriously one of the best things going), and then a couple of episodes of Northern Exposure.

Northern Exposure was a successful attempt to make an intelligent offbeat sit-com, in the truest sense of all those words. Ultimately, it fell to Romantic Nationalism but not intentionally so, it reminded me of an article I have yet to read, James Miller's "inventing the 'found' object" that contends that "mainstream or popular ethnography in the 1930s (despite its often explicit interest in critiquing or challenging commercial modernity) came to underwrite a particular and highly over determined narrative of corporate-capitalist 'progress.' "

For all it's well-intentioned jingoism, it did have one particularly short exchange between Chris the philosophy Spouting DJ and Ed the taciturn Indian Filmmaker that I thought mirrored in three minutes the history of folklore.

Chris begins to tell Ed all about the wonders of Democracy, in fact he had just stepped outside to "breathe the air of democracy" - there's yer Romantic Nationalism. Then he says, "The idea of an election is much more interesting to me than the election itself...The act of voting is in itself the defining moment." yup, that's performance theory (it'll take all semester to learn this but everything between Grimm and Ben-Amos is basically BS) and finally the metaphoric nod to postmodernist theory comes when Ed asked Chris who he's gonna vote for; Chris says, "I'm a convicted felon Ed, I can't vote."

Afterwards, and even more enlightening, we watched Woody Allen's "Stardust Memories" supposedly a "watershed movie" of Allen's. It is terribly shallow, solipsistic and self-referential; this last aspect appears in multiple levels. It is in many ways "postmodern" self aware and little more than a regime of surfaces. But it didn't ring true, because it didn't meld to aesthetic of postmodernity. Which only begs deeper questions: there's an aesthetic to postmodernity? And does a lack meaning actually imply deeper meaning? Or worse, meaning in its absence? Like the old Ayn Rand saying (via Neil Peart of course) "If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice", similarly if you've chosen not to say anything, what does that choice say? As opposed to Allen’s movie, which very self-consciously says nothing, saying nothing says something. Doubly so if self-consciously so. Are you following me? It gets complicated and unnecessarily deep in some quickly, but drives a deeper point is there and aesthetic (which implies meaning) to postmodern veneer? Which -by the way- is decidedly NOT Michael Ann's take of Pomo-Ethno...but you'll learn that soon enough my pretties.

In any case, a perfectly good thoughtless evening has been thwarted.

President Ransdell actually human alien hybrid

WKU President Ransdell, explaining diagrams of the pan-dimensional craft brought him to our planet. "we seek peaceful co-existence" said Ransdell, shortly before vaporizing the foundation members in attendance. In a related story, this weeks cafeteria special: Soylent Green.

is the semester over yet?

BTW here's my class web site.

The Calling Plan Makes the Master

Look at these idiots. You're graduating: "HANG UP THE PHONE"

Using Google to save time on your folklore paper.

Bibliographies.
go to google and type this in "citation last name, first name "a handful of words from the title"
example: citation Glassie, Henry "spirit of folk art"
chances are good that you'll come up with the work in someone else's bibliography online. cut and paste into your own.
chances are actually pretty good they'll already by in Chicago-style format.
Unless they're from the JAF itself for some reason.

Tangental Ideas you've already read.
Assuming you the sort of idiot that doesn't doesn't write page numbers in the reading notes (like me), google the name of the author and the idea you want to express. example: Bendix, Regina negotiation of tradition chances are someone else has already covered similar territory and if you really lucky have cited it in JAF format (Bendix 1997: 23) But here's the important second part, Ed. Make sure you actually go to the library and check out the book to make sure that that is what it actually says on page 23. Chances are good that if your professor has read this blog, he's going to do the same thing.

Evidence of the value of folklore, here, in the now.

Two stories in the news struck me as releveant to this thing we do.

The first was a episode of "This American Life" two weeks ago on NPR. I like the show a lot: for inexplicable some reason, it's mix of amateur ethnography and GenX snarkiness appeals to me. :-) Two weeks ago they aired a show called "Back from the dead", one of the stories (called "Flood Lights") was about the revival of the High School football season in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. Now you need to understand that in the wake of Hurricane Katrina there is no Bay St. Louis, Mississippi anymore. Still the High School team assembled a motley crew -a la the Bad News Bears- to start up the season again. In many ways, it seems incongruous—nay ridiculous—that there would be such a desire to play fucking football, and admittedly Football does not normally qualify as "folklife" or "folklore". But, in Bay St. Louis it had been elevated to the level of ritual. And in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, it became a galvanizing force for the community and a much needed return to normalcy. Listening to this compelling tale reminded me that what we study is endemic, a part of the core of who we are even in these complicated -and often shallow times. Sometimes these little rituals, these quirks of small communities, can suddenly be really important. (to hear the story in real audio click here and fast forward to 39:30)

Second, and much sadder, is this NPR news story today: "Sentencing is expected Tuesday for Chai Soua Vang in the murder of six deer hunters last year. The shooting in northern Wisconsin followed a racially charged trespassing confrontation between Vang, who is Hmong, and the men. The tension lingers as hunters prepare for this year's hunting season." seems I can't get through a week this semester without reading something Hmong culture. Listening to the story it's obvious that Northern Wisconsin has a cultural identity and cultural immigration issues (beyond this case which may be precisely what the media has intimated it to be) It is in these instances that the plain practical value of what we do (as well as anthropologists, sociologists and that like) becomes readily, painfully, apparent. link

Dammit! Is this my next paper...or just another windmill?

I am convinced Apple gets most of their marketing ideas from heroin dealers. They constantly screw with you (and their resellers --notice they don't call them 'dealers') but never so much that you'll say "screw you, I am going to the other side".

Obviously in recent posts, I have been thinking about capitalism as an analogy of Orwell's 1984.

Apple, and it's devotes, have always loved to paint Microsoft (or M$) as "Big Brother". Against this backdrop Apple paints themselves as a technological Winston Smith (and hey if you believe a tacky homemade quilt can be a metaphor for "the secret language of women" I think it's safe to say you'll dance to anything). But I think in reality they may actually be O'brien.

All this makes this once very cool commercial (directed by Ridley Scott, who at the time had just finished Blade Runner) suddenly poignant.

I wonder if the girl's name was Julia.

Oh one last thing. If you like to learn more about the early days of Apple just go to (I shit you not) folklore.org

and dig their slogan: “History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.” -- George Santayana

Indeed the past is truly created in the present.