Nominations, cont’d.
In the interest of consolidating all the names in one place, I’ve taken the liberty of doing so, culling from the various posts and comments, plus adding a few more:
Anthony Kelley and Jennifer Jenkins (they could even do a “team” keynote presentation). They co-taught a course last fall in the law school with law professor Jamie Boyle on “Music Composition: Borrowing and the Law.” Very interdisciplinary and a great fit for our topic. Boyle and Jenkins are featured in the graphic comic “Bound By Law”: http://www.law.duke.edu/cspd/comics/ about documentary film making, fair use, and intellectual property and copyright issues. A sequel is supposedly coming out on music featuring Kelley.
MUSIC AND LAW:
Anthony Kelley is a professor in Music: http://fds.duke.edu/db/aas/Music/faculty/antk
For an interesting discussion of musical borrowing, see “The Splendid Thievery of Anthony Kelley”
Jennifer Jenkins directs the Center for the Study of the Public Domain and is a lecturing fellow in the law school, specializing in intellectual property law: http://www.law.duke.edu/fac/jenkins/
COMICS:
Brooke McEldowney: Wikipedia article on him, which links to further Wikipedia articles on his two comic strips
9 Chickweed Lane (his main comic strip, the one seen ’round the world)
Pibgorn (his online-only comic strip – featuring a re-working of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream)
ENVIRONMENT AND ART:
Bryant Holsenbeck, environmental artist from Durham www.bryantholsenbeck.com/
Does workshops to make your own journals.
Noah Scalin, graphic design professor at VCU, specializes in socially conscious design
alrdesign.com (read his philosophy)
noahs@alrdesign.com
elin o’hara slavick
(teaches at UNC, does strong/political work)
http://www.unc.edu/~eoslavic/
HUMANITIES
Franklin Humanities Institute’s “Recycle” seminar fellows: http://www.jhfc.duke.edu/fhi/seminar/sem0708.php
Mark Anthony Neal, Professor of Black Popular Culture, AAAS, co-convener of FHI “Recycle” Seminar:
In order to attack old assumptions of the relationship between “high” and “low” culture I consider the ways that cultural texts and icons are recycled in the service of popular art. For example, the music industry reformulates previously recorded songs and random mass media utterings for contemporary consumption through the practice of sampling and remixing. This practice has been particularly common in hip-hop, which can be described as a sonic collage brilliantly exhibiting producers’ broad musical palate. Sampling and remixing also extends to the recycling of popular iconography and vernacular language use, including figures like the “pimp” (and the act of pimping) and pejoratives like the word “nigger”.
Pedro Lasch, Professor of the Practice of Visual Arts, FHI Faculty Fellow in “Recycle” seminar: http://fds.duke.edu/db/aas/AAH/faculty/pedro.lasch
and also: George Gopen (English)
ENVIRONMENT AND WATER – THE DROUGHT
Possibly city or NSOE folks involved in the Durham town hall meeting on the drought earlier in January. http://www.nicholas.duke.edu/news/ns-watertownhall2.html
For example, among others:
Bill Holman, senior visiting fellow at the Nicholas School
Ted Voorhees, Durham’s deputy city manager: theodore.voorhees@durhamnc.gov
PHYSICAL (MATERIAL) RECYCLING
George W. Roberts, retired professor of chemical and biomolecular Engineering, and/or Dr. Saad A. Khan, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering (NCSU): http://news.ncsu.edu/releases/2007/feb/025.html
EXPERIENTIAL RECYCLING (PSYCHOLOGY):Beth Marsh (psychology) - works on human memory
Roberto Cabeza (psychology) - works on neural correlates of memory and cognition
Kevin LaBar (psychology) - works on the cognitive neuroscience of emotional learning and memory
More on Polaris
(Updated to include more articles and context.)
By the way, lest you think that only blog commenters are interested in the region of the Polaris nominees, look at the coverage in the National Post and the The Toronto Star, both based in Toronto, and both of which highlight the Montreal-centered list. Meanwhile, the StarPhoenix in Saskatoon simultaneously highlights the regionalism while trying to discount it.
That said, as this commentary from the CBC and this one from Toronto’s EyeWeekly shows, there are other criticisms too, starting with the uniformity of genre. And that’s true. Basically, this year is all indie rockers (although Julie Doiron is pretty folky), which comes in stark contrast to last year’s list, which included some hip-hop (K’naan and Cadence Weapon), some folk (Sarah Harmer), some mildly electronica-ish rock (Metric), and the challenging, arty, and terrific Final Fantasy (the final winner). (Last year’s list was also more geographically balanced and included Francophone act Malajube, which is often heralded as the first Francophone band to break out into Anglophone Canada.)
It’s probably worth pointing out that given the way Polaris works (a larger jury of music critics submit a list of five choices each, and then the top ten vote-getters are shortlisted) some of these complaints are merely sour grapes. The band I included in my top five didn’t get selected. This is probably made more so by the fact that the jury discusses while they’re making their top-five lists.
Greetings from the Explosion City
After a splendid, two-week vacation in China and some time recuperating from having a wisdom tooth extracted, I’m now in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where I spend my says (six of them a week), in the Public Archives of Nova Scotia. I’m going through a sample of around 14,000 files about families that applied for aid after an enormous explosion in 1917. The explosion, which killed around 2000 people, was the largest human-caused explosion until Hiroshima (although that’s a rather silly thing to say, since “largest explosion” doesn’t actually have very much meaning).
A friend of mine–at the time, I was living in France and he in England–once described a theory of expat experience to me. He suggested that when Americans go to country that speaks a foreign language, they expect things to be different, and so their time there is spent becoming more and more aware of how much the same things are. In contrast, when Americans go abroad to Anglophone countries, they expect things to be roughly the same, and so they spend their time there discovering how different things are in each country. I’m not actually sure he’s right, but in any case, one of the things frequent or long-term American visitors to Canada have to think about is how and whether Canada is particularly different from the US. (Those of us who study Canada, of course, could be said to study this as our jobs.) Here are three pieces of news that Canadians are talking about that help describe the difference, or not, between the Canada and “the Republic to the South.” (more…)
