Mix-tape flashback of the month!

November spawned a monster.

Rolling like thun-dah

This past week, StraightMan embarked on an "organization" project: He uploaded all of the CDs that we own onto his computer. Turns out we do not have all that many. The compact disc became the audio medium of choice during our college years. Speaking for myself, I bought only the CDs that my suite-mates or friends did not buy. I mean, how many copies of the same REM / Indigo Girls album could we possibly need?

I think I reached the peak of my music purchasing years when I was 17 or so. The medium then: Cassette tapes. Which I rather miss: The Smiths' "Hatful of Hollow," which I bought at a record store in Andover, Massachusetts, because it felt then like I hadn't had a dream in a long time...

These days, I rarely buy music, unless it I heard about it on NPR. Which means that it is a critic's darling kind of album or an iconic 80s pop rocker reinventing himself as a roots artist. Does Bryan Adams have a tribute to Muddy Waters? Or will Cyndi Lauper please record an album of Brazilian bossa nova with lush orchestrations?

That said. I sooo was feeling Elton John. I'm still standing...

Feeling my ethnicity

As an anthropologist, I am all about questioning essentialisms like race and ethnicity. Yet, as a person, I also feel their significance.

For example: This evening, an invitation comes through my Inbox to come out to a Little Feat show.

I turn to StraightMan: "How do I answer this? What is Little Feat?"

I entertain the possibility that it might be my age - the Wiki on Little Feat gives me the impression that the band had its heyday during the 1970s? I mean, look at the photo above.

StraightMan, also my age, however, exhibits a brand of familiarity and ease with (and enthusiasm for) Little Feat that provokes in me an emotion that ought to have a German word giving name to it: A response that is connected with the surprise of the familiar being made suddenly strange, like looking at one's own face in the mirror and not recognizing it, like talking with one's spouse and realizing that there are depths there that I fear to plumb.

So, I have to ask him: "Is this one of those bands that white people like?"

A pause. "Maybe." Another pause. "Probably."