U2

Toaster Sunshine channels Jack White for science and technology outreach

terrasig — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 13:02:15 +0000

Toaster Sunshine channels Jack White for science and technology outreach

At the recent U2 Academic Conference, I had the opportunity to be at the local premiere of It Might Get Loud, a much-more-than documentary of the electric guitar as told through the careers of Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page, U2's The Edge, and Jack White of The White Stripes and Raconteurs. For the record, I thought that White was going to be totally out of his league - while I wouldn't call him a "legend" as billed by the producers, I left being incredibly impressed with his background and breadth of abilities.

Related to the movie trailer below, I had an exchange with Toaster Sunshine, a musician and scientist who writes the blog, Mad Scientist, Jr. (Tagline: "Sticking stuff that wasn't made to be stuck to stuff to stuff that wasn't made to have stuff stuck to it.") The trailer opens and closes with Jack White constructing a primitive electric guitar with a weathered wood plank, a bottle, and some wires and such - Toaster knew exactly what it was and told me how to do it myself.

However, as a microcosm of our respective lives (Toaster is still in the lab and I am primarily at my computer), Toaster actually made the instrument yesterday.

For the hackerspace, I send out a lot of emails. Most of them get ignored, but some of them stick. One of the ones that got a reply was a request to tour a museum collection of rare and antique musical instruments that the university's music school owns. In one of the conversations we had with the outreach director of the collection, we decided that co-hosting an educational event that melds technology and music into a workshop for kids and their parents. This is what is referred to as a Make and Take, participants register, pay a fee for parts, come and get taught how to make stuff, and then get to take it home with them afterwards.

Yup, he even provided photographic evidence that he did make it. For the kids (and for himself, I'm sure). And he gave us instructions on how to make our own, complete with things he'd do differently.

Toaster jokes about this project being more hacking than science but I argue otherwise: this IS science, all the fun, curiosity, and "hey, what if I try this?" mentality that got us all into this business that is often sadly beaten out of us by grad school and grant slogging.

Slapping together some wires and such just to see what happens and how one can then make it better? That's science and engineering, my friends. (Just like DrugMonkey's $100 Spike neuroscience colleagues, Tim Marzullo and Greg Gage. SfN 2008, SfN 2009)

So thanks, Toaster, for spreading the gospel to kids and their parents.

In honor of Toaster and his two-string slide guitar, I leave you with this classic song by The Presidents of the United States of America and another homemade tech project. One day, I also hope to be an old man on the back porch, slurpin' on a peach, playing my two-string, one-string, and no-string guitars.

Final note: You may be wondering, as I have, about where the name Toaster Sunshine is derived. Well, British chemist, Sarah Murray, (who tweets under @SarahScientist and blogs at Chemistress) chose to ask and the man tweeted back as follows:

Toaster from breakfast multitool (eggs, toast/waffles, bacon in one chassis) I once built, Sunshine is nocturnal irony.

Now that's an invention I want to see.

terrasig Sat, 11/21/2009 - 08:02

Anthony DeCurtis, U2 conference keynote speaker, in NYTimes on Summer of 1969 Peace, Love, and Charlie Manson

terrasig — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 09:17:37 +0000

Anthony DeCurtis, U2 conference keynote speaker, in NYTimes on Summer of 1969 Peace, Love, and Charlie Manson

Just a quick note this morning as I picked up the dead-tree version of The New York Times this morning in the PharmDriveway.

For some reason, I recognized the name of Anthony DeCurtis in the byline of this short essay on the Manson family Tate-LaBianca murders marking the demise of the 1960s counterculture movement. I posted yesterday on the speakers at the upcoming conference, U2: The Feedback and The Hype - DeCurtis is keynote speaker.

No surprise here since DeCurtis - Dr. DeCurtis, I learned below - has been a contributing editor to Rolling Stone mag and books, with many works in the NYT. From the conference website:

Anthony DeCurtis is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, where his work has appeared for more than twenty-five years, and occasionally writes for The New York Times and many other publications. He is the author of In Other Words: Artists Talk About Life and Work, as well as Rocking My Life Away: Writing About Music and Other Matters. He is also the editor of Present Tense: Rock & Roll and Culture, and co-editor of The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll and The Rolling Stone Album Guide (3rd edition). His essay accompanying the Eric Clapton box set "Crossroads" won a Grammy Award in the "Best Album Notes" category, and he wrote the liner notes for U2's recent release of the remastered live album Under a Blood Red Sky, and for the DVD release of their historic Live at Red Rocks concert. He has written about U2 since 1984, and his most recent interview with Bono was for Rolling Stone's 40th anniversary issue. He holds a Ph.D. in American literature, and teaches in the writing program at the University of Pennsylvania.

Today, his NYT essay details the influence of the Manson family killings on the decline of the 1960s free love, counterculture movement. I learned therein that Manson had a rather close musical relationship with The Beach Boys' Dennis Wilson (who recorded one of Manson's songs) and was acquainted with Neil Young.

For those young'uns who don't know, Manson and three of his followers were convicted of the grisly murder of 8½-month-pregnant actress Sharon Tate, then wife of director Roman Polanski, and houseguests Abigail Folger, Voytek Frykowski, and Jay Sebring (Polanski was filming in London at the time; superb account from Univ of Missouri Law School here) and, on the next night, of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca. The 40th anniversary of these killings is next weekend (correctly the early morning hours of the 9th and 10th August 1969 but sometimes listed as 8th and 9th).

DeCurtis speaks of the tremendous convergence of events in the summer of 1969, far more weighty than the trite Bryan Adams song released in 1985:

Speaking about the 40th anniversary of Woodstock, Arlo Guthrie recently asked, "How many other events from 1969 are we still talking about?" Plenty, as it turns out, and for reasons far more compelling than inexhaustible boomer nostalgia. By any measure, the last year of the '60s was crammed with events, Woodstock among them, that have lived on as symbolic battlegrounds in the culture wars that have dominated our country's politics since then.

Do you perceive the Apollo 11 moon landing as a triumph of cold war America's technological might, or as the "Oh, wow" first journey to places "where no man has gone before"? Was the death of Mary Jo Kopechne at Chappaquiddick a tragic accident that ultimately and unfortunately put out of reach the presidential ambitions of an idealistic young senator from Massachusetts? Or was it the most egregious consequence of the Kennedy family's long chronicle of recklessness and self-indulgence? Your answers to those questions most likely reflect your place on the political spectrum.

A few of our more senior colleagues such as Effect Measure blogger, revere, lived these days firsthand and could probably speak to this essay with a perspective similar to that of DeCurtis. Those of us who were toddlers then at least learned of these events through our babysitters and grade school (a friend of our babysitter was killed in a rollover car accident while returning from Woodstock). DeCurtis brings this time alive for the rest in a relatively short piece that reflects on the cultural significance of the monumental events of 40 years ago.

I'm really looking forward to meeting Dr DeCurtis in October at the U2 Conference.

terrasig Sun, 08/02/2009 - 05:17

U2 Academic Conference Registration Opens; Q&A With Organizer, Scott Calhoun

terrasig — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 04:02:37 +0000

U2 Academic Conference Registration Opens; Q&A With Organizer, Scott Calhoun

During the summer between high school and college, about this very time in 1981, I was sitting at a beach house in North Carolina listening to my uncle rail against The Beatles. He held that the band never truly took its fame and international press attention to doing anything good for the world except to glorify LSD.

I now get to tell him about U2.

That summer also saw the launch of MTV and in fall I watched four young Dubliners on a barge playing a song called, "Gloria," the opening track of their album October. And in the intervening years the band, and especially its lead singer Bono, have used their international platform to raise awareness and act upon injustices worldwide. In 2002, Bono and Bobby Shriver co-founded the humanitarian organization DATA (debt, AIDS, trade, Africa), known now as ONE. Among their many causes, the pharmacologist in me has been most impressed with ONE and Bono's personal efforts to make antiretroviral HIV/AIDS drugs available in sub-Saharan Africa.

I've long been a fan of the band, U2 - so much so that during graduate school I played in a U2 tribute band (I was Adam Clayton). So imagine my delight when I read this in a press release a few weeks ago:

ACHTUNG U2 FANS
Come spend a few days talking, listening and thinking about what U2 has done. We're bringing together scholars, teachers, students, journalists, clergy, musicians and intellectually curious U2 fans for a rich program of exploring this truly one-of-a-kind band for a truly one-of-a-kind conference, and we hope you'll be in the room.

Is it all so much hype? Are we lost in their feedback? Or is this band of ambitions, paradoxes, ironies and sincerity the real thing? If you think U2 has played a role, for better or worse, in changing the worlds of music, entertainment, popular culture, humanitarian relief, peace and social justice efforts - or has changed the world in you - then come join the conversation. Meet us in the sound!

U2: The Hype and The Feedback is the first academic conference devoted to the band and will be held on the campus of North Carolina Central University (NCCU) in Durham, NC, over the weekend of October 2-4, 2009. The date coincides with the band's 3rd October concert in Raleigh and, coincidentally, the 28th anniversary of the release of October.

Registration opened today and Tracey Hackett just put up a nice article about the conference overnight.

In addition to smaller concurrent sessions, the conference will include keynote speaker, Anthony DeCurtis, longtime contributing editor at Rolling Stone, British music critic Neil McCormick, Ugandan nurse and AIDS activist Agnes Nyamayarwo, @U2 founding editor Matt McGee, and Jim Henke by video from the Rock and Rock Hall of Fame Museum.

Conference organizer, Dr. Scott Calhoun, is Associate Professor of English at Cedarville University and teaches journalism, literature, and composition courses. I was fortunate to nail down Scott in the flurry leading up to today's commencement of conference registration.

How does one convert a love of U2 into a scholarly activity? Do you actually incorporate U2 works into your course offerings?

U2 is one of those rock bands that approaches making and performing music as a craft. The band members are well-schooled in music and art history, as well as in literature, film, religion and politics. The music they make and the performances they give are works, if you will, that we in the humanities find it natural to study and discuss. The poetics and rhetorics of the texts U2 have created are rich fields of inquiry for exploring the human condition. I've incorporated their work into discussions in my classes, from a single song to a whole album. Sometimes there's an "unfamiliarity gap" that needs to be bridged, but it's never been hard to persuade an open-minded person that U2 makes music for the heart and mind - the kind of music that makes you feel something and want to start asking questions.

So, there are scholarly publications about U2?

There is a growing body of academic writing about U2. In the past 10 years or so, more books have been coming out that are more of inquiries into the band's work than fan treatments. I have a bibliography of most of the major book treatments on U2 in English at the site. http://www.u2conference.com/biblio.php

That's a great resource on the conference page. Between the speakers and the papers listed thus far, the meeting schedule looks to be quite vibrant and eclectic. How did you go about soliciting contributors of papers for the conference?

We issued a Call for Papers through the Chronicle of Higher Education and the normal listservs that cover the humanities and theology/philosophy disciplines. I write for @U2 (www.atu2.com) and Books & Culture, and we spread the word through those channels as well. Most academics who think, write and teach about U2 are well-connected in the on-line world, so it wasn't hard to get the word out. We received nearly 100 paper proposals.

I only just learned of the conference from your press release but I just read a blogpost from June by News & Observer music writer David Menconi that you had narrowed down the conference site to North Carolina Central University and Oxford, MS (presumably at Ole Miss)? How did NCCU win out?

Both schools made appealing offers, and Durham and Oxford have great U2 fan communities. Some really motivated U2 fans in Durham kept reaching out to us and helped us connect with NCCU. With NCCU's rich history of educating the community through the arts and music, as well as their special focus on honoring the oppressed and the champions of freedom for all peoples, we thought this was a great place to have the first academic conference on U2. The more you look into the missions and histories of NCCU and U2, the more you see both have had a common "goal of soul" and "elevation." ;) There's also a U2 concert close by the same weekend as the conference!

There is an interesting aspect of the spirituality and commitment to social justice and civil rights evident in the lyrics of U2. NCCU is a historically-black college/university (HBCU) currently celebrating the 100th anniversary of its founding - despite being a state university now, NCCU was originally founded as "The National Religious Training School and Chautauqua for the Colored Race." Did this convergence of the university's centennial and its original mission play any role in having NCCU host the conference?

We're thrilled to be a part of NCCU's centennial year celebration. When I learned of NCCU's original founding purpose, all I could think of was how the spirit moves in mysterious ways. ;) I hope we honor the intentions of those early Chautauquians!

The question whose answer everyone wants to know: Any chance that any U2 members will make a cameo at the conference?

If they can come and not affect our academic objectivity, they are more than welcome to stop in! We've invited them, of course, and don't know of their intentions at this time.

If readers have any other questions for Dr. Calhoun, just drop them in the comments and I'll see if he can get to them.

Thanks, Scott, for taking time to give us a little more insight about the conference.

Here is an overview of registration information from Tracey Hackett's article:

Early bird registration fees, which run from Aug. 1 through Sept. 7, are $129 for students with active identifications and $179 for the public. Standard registration fees, which run from Sept. 8 until the conference reaches capacity, are $149 for students and $209 for the public. Both early and standard conference registrations include costs for a reception on Friday and lunch on Saturday and Sunday.

One-day registrations, for either Saturday or Sunday and includes lunch for that day, is $89 for students and $129 for the public. A ticket for the Friday evening kick-off event and reception only is $25.

Conference registration does not include the cost of lodging or purchase of a ticket to U2's Raleigh concert.

The cost of registering for the conference can be paid for by check, PayPal account, or credit card via PayPal.

For more information and registration for the conference, log onto its web site at www.U2conference.com. You can also follow conference development on Twitter, Facebook, and the official conference blog.

terrasig Sat, 08/01/2009 - 00:02