Tag Archives: cmu

Presenting on Minstrelsy and Popular Culture Wednesday (1pm) at CMU

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This week, Wednesday April 24th – Friday April 26th, Central Michigan University is hosting it’s first ever Diversity Symposium. A friend of mine in the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion encouraged me to submit to present, so I decided to bring my special lecture on how minstrelsy is baked into American Popular Culture out for another go!

*Ignore that date and time! This is an old flyer, but the information/content are still relevant.

If you’re in Mt. Pleasant, come see me this Wednesday at 1pm in Terrace Room A in the Bovee Student Center. It’s an unfortunately evergreen topic of discussion, but recent actions by certain members of the CMU community have made it even more unfortunately evergreen.

Looking forward to this, and thanks to everyone at the OIDEI for organizing it. Interested parties can register here for more information.

Tyler from the Historic Howell Theater Visits Honors 206

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Tyler DePerro, who kickstarted the new iteration of the Historic Howell Theater in Howell, MI 9 years ago and still operates it today, drove up to talk to my Honors Class about the theater and its role in the community. The students thoroughly enjoyed his visit, especially the litany of cakes people had brought to birthday parties at the theater over the years.

Two show-and-tell items that Tyler brought (which you can see in the photo, above) are an old-school film canister (when film was still projected on 35mm prints in most theaters) and a modern hard drive, which contained the 4K restoration of Stop Making Sense. My favorite moment of the day was when I asked Tyler how old he was when he opened the theater, and he said he was 24, just a couple of years out of college himself. One of my central themes of teaching a course about Popular Culture and Social Structures is encouraging students to write their own story and grow their own places; you don’t need decades of experience – you just need a lot of determination and a good community behind you.

Thank you to Tyler for taking the time. For those of you who live in Michigan and haven’t been to the Historic Howell yet, make sure to amend that soon. If you’re around on Saturday the 14th, check out their 11-hour Horror Movie marathon; every movie is great either objectively (e.g. 1973’s The Wicker Man) or in its own way (1984’s Extro).

Sonic Sunday Clips (02.02.20: My First Talk in Canada, and Bruce Springsteen at the CMU FilmFest)

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Happy February, everyone. This is shaping up to be quite a busy month for me, if this week is any indication. I’ve actually got two talks in two different countries planned for this weekend, both of which are about musical geography.

  • Friday, I will be paying a visit to the University of Windsor over the river in Ontario to talk about Capitals of Punk with students at the School of Creative Arts, in the Armouries. The talk starts at noon.

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  • Saturday (6pm) and Sunday (12:30pm), I’ll be speaking about the Boss for a bit following CMU Film Festival screenings of his performance film ‘Western Stars.’ The Saturday screening will be at the CMU Main Library, and the Sunday screening will be at the Broadway Theater, downtown.

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Have a great week, everyone! I’ll be back with some more clips, announcements, and randomly chosen videos next week.

A New Life in a New Town (Central Michigan University)

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or, I could just call this entry ‘Fire Up, Chips!’

0826191108a_hdr I would say I’m surprised I haven’t written anything here about my new position and base of operations in Mt. Pleasant, MI, but that would involve me ignoring how little I’ve posted in general over the past month. I’m still hoping to post some pictures from the IAG meeting in Hobart, I swear.

Right before I left for Australia, I accepted a position as a Lecturer in the department of Geography and Environmental Science at Central Michigan University.  I’m teaching four classes this semester: two sections of the world regional course GEO 121 WI (that means writing-intensive), one section of ENV 101 WI (Introduction to Environmental Science…writing-intensive), and one section of GEO 350 (The United States and Canada). So far, I have no complaints. I’m working with a great new faculty who have been overwhelmingly supportive, and from what I can tell now that classes have begun, really cool students as well. I had trouble preparing to teach my class today because so many people were stopping by to ask how I was doing, offer help wherever needed, or invite me to play pickleball (which I’m sure will be a blast, once I look up what that is).

Also, I can’t say enough good things about living in the middle of the Mitten. Mt. Pleasant in particular is a wonderful place, with extreme walk-ability, wonderful cycling culture, a disproportionately high number of good radio stations, a cat-fé, and if you move here on a Thursday toward the end of the summer, Max & Emily’s may enable you to watch Brian Vander Ark and his band play a free show minutes from your house. For the life of me, I cannot remember a more fortuitous “Welcome, Tyler!” moment anywhere else I’ve moved.

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Brian also welcomed me to Michigan via Instagram (a proposition that would make less than zero sense to my thirteen-year-old self, enjoying a Verve Pipe video on MTV), telling me to say hello to Mustard Plug when I go see them at the Bell’s Brewery in October. I guess those rumors about the great Grand Rapids ska/alt-rock beef were unfounded after all.

As always, thanks for reading. Back to lesson-planning and life-organizing.

COMING SOON

  • Part Three of “Tyler Down Under” (It’s going to happen!)
  • Part One of “The Ben Irving Postcards Go to Michigan”
  • Updates on CMU Course Work and hopefully some news about Capitals of Punk