A few things from week 3's seminar

Umm... didn't get to Merriam—thus we'll spend this coming Thursday on him and maybe a little more on projects, now that everyone is committed—don't worry about the week 4 Nettle readings for now. Try to catch up with your comments and work on your projects. Come ready to discuss the Merriam!

A couple of things that came up on Thursday:

Reading:

Said, Edward. 1979. Orientalism. New York: Vintage.

This book, though often disagreed with on both factual and theoretical grounds, is one of the fundamental readings on race and ethnicity, otherness and othering, and cross-cultural encounter. Said argues that the Western view of "the Orient" is a continuously constructed imperialist fiction (as, among other reasons, it is absurd to think that the whole of the East is in any respect homogenous), and that this fiction permeates not only the West itself, but also the Orient. It deals with difficult, and often uncomfortable ideas, but is very well written.

MP3 and compression:

I, and one of your colleagues, went on a miniature rant about compression and sound quality. Here are some links to info about it. I suppose, I'd suggest that at some point you go into a place that sells some high end audio gear and take a listen to a good quality recording of something you like on a good set of headphones and some good speakers, just to get a sense of what the possibilities are and how much we lose with compressed audio files, computer speakers and cheap ear buds.

Neil Young hates MP3s, and a neat rundown on music file types

And here is a visual representation...

...and here is the "for dummies" site rundown on how it relates to itunes


Music:

We mentioned drum language and I offered some of Sheila Chandra's recordings as an example (her music is also a great example of several different sorts of fusion: the connection of traditional and global forms of music—see two below; and of more than one tradition—multi-cultural fusion, see three below). She recorded three albums for Peter Gabriel's Real World label (fusion/world beat based) and a song of hers was used on the Lord of the Rings soundtrack:

Speaking in Tongues

and the dance mix for those of you into electronica:

Lagan Love/Nada Bhrama:

...and finally:

The 1940's (since 1941 I think) Hollywood scene steakhouse that has jazz and a dance floor that I mentioned is called Cafe La Maze (video at the link) and is actually in National City.