Odds & Ends

Now that I've gotten Tauno Pylkkänen out of my life, I'm free to waste time again. Naturally, this is one of my first stops. My headspace isn't cleared out enough to make any serious statements, so in no particular order, while my carrot-ginger soup simmers:

Interesting article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (via Artsjournal) about PhD degrees and studio art, and whether artists should be made to do doctoral work in order to be considered qualified to teach at the university level. That one hit a little close to home, for a variety of reasons, most of them having to do with my being in the "why am I doing this?" stage of my own studies.

Gordon Ramsey was in town promoting a new book and was given a tasting of some of the blander Finnish "delicacies" by a local morning show hostess, and was apparently Not Very Nice. Having seen the video (2nd from the top under the 31.10 dateline, it goes into English a minute or so in), I won't even bother to defend him. He acted like a boor. However, inviting a guy like Ramsey into your studio and then claiming to be shocked – shocked! – when he does what he's famous for is a little disingenuous. Being confronted with a stone cold Saarioinen Karelian pasty covered in margarine/egg whip at the crack of dawn probably wouldn't bring out the best in me, either. That said, anyone from the land of haggis has no business comparing another nation's foodstuffs to excrement, even if it does look like mämmi. There's been a mild uproar about it reminiscent of the time Conan O'Brien visited Canada and had Triumph the Insult Comic Dog say some very unfunny things about French Canadians. A tempest in a teapot, to be sure.

And, last but not least, I've finally joined the ranks of drones I see walking around everywhere, shutting the world out and barring any form of social interaction. The siren call of not having to carry tons of CDs proved too powerful to resist.


I could justify it by saying that I'll be away the whole month of January (more on that later) and will need to make my Mahler collection more portable if I'm going to prepare my class, but who am I kidding? It's unbelievably cool!

Listening:

Param Vir: Between Earth and Sky (recorded from the BBC website with iRecordMusic, the greatest software on earth.)
Glenn Gould: The Idea of North (The Solitude Trilogy, Part 1)
Sigur Rós: Agaetis Byrjun