Baltimore Avenue; it’s got something for everyone!

So many problems with Wicked: For Good, but a big one is that random choices by the MGM costume department in the 1930s is not really a strong basis for world-making.

The butter turkey I forgot to put out on the table for Thanksgiving 2024, and which has been biding its time in the fridge ever since, watching Thanksgiving 2025 come and go.

okay, but this does make chatGPT a little bit relatable….😔

I met Jolene in person! Very good dog.

I just know the Trump is watching Matteo Bocelli sing in the Thanksgiving parade, his chin quivering, a tear slipping down his cheek. “this is why we do the work,” he murmurs, calling for another Diet Coke.

Thankful for a cold Thanksgiving—fridge space multiples to include the poorly insulated parts of the house!

One of the charms of seeing a movie in my neighborhood is there are good odds that when the camera pans to reveal post-coital Elpheba and Fiyero, a teenaged girl with her face painted green will shout out to the theater, “oh they fucked goooooood.”

The deep WASP shame I have that my dining room table only seats 8, and I have to add a card table and mid-matched tablecloth to get everyone in tomorrow.

Not to be a snob, but not sure that Wicked: For Good counts as “the best of independent, foreign, and documentary film”?

One does not feel confident that the OU administration has their faculty member’s back…

Appreciate @wbender99.bsky.social for continuing to tug on the threads of this complicated but also obviously tragic situation. www.inquirer.com/news/phil-pu...

Gonna put a link to this in the “policies” section of my syllabi.

As a college sophomore, on a whim I did a library catalogue search for “gay+music” and sat down in the stacks to read “Musicality, Essentialism, and the Closet.”

Amidst all the funny moments, let’s not forget the image of Donald Trump personally finding a portrait of FDR “in the vaults.”

Bit of a buried lede here that Mayor Parker reveals that she is “most excited” to give tax breaks to developers to convert closed public schools into apartments, just as the school district whose board she appointed is getting ready to close a bunch of public schools.

Philly’s own @repbrendanboyle.bsky.social out there voting for a right-wing Republican resolution throwing the new Democratic mayor of NYC—and many of his own constituents—under the bus. For what reason?

Going to be honest, I have a Naomi-style problem in telling apart Nuzzi, Munn, and Wilde. For some reasons Rodrigo is fine.

My seminar tomorrow is talking about modernism and neoclassicism in the Trump administration, centered around the amazing “regional car dealership rococo” essay by @katewagner.wehwalt.net. mcmansionhell.com/post/7810945...

Grateful (hopefully) that more people will be able to move to my neighborhood some day.

Cleaning out my daughter’s backpack and found what I can only describe as a stack of loyalty oaths she seems to have made the younger kids at afterschool sign.

Random thought, but did Amy Gutman ever publicly weigh in on the past year’s attempts of billionaires and the Trump administration to destroy Penn/higher ed?

I think this is the thing; when elites are worried about their security, they latch onto their weakest link (and bonus points if they have other unrelated conflicts with him) to take the fall.

I hope I’m wrong, but hard not to predict that Larry Summers will be the only public figure to suffer reputational and (hopefully!) material consequences from the Epstein scandal. Well-deserved, but there are so many more…

Bizarre ceremony, bizarre choices. As expected, Philly food scene is not well-suited to Michelin’s restaurant-as-bland-neoliberal-tourist destination model. Which is something to be proud of!

This Michelin ceremony is so bizarre; nobody involved seems clear as to what genre of event it is?

Annual reminder that there are few better weekend activities for children than going to a dog show and petting all the weird ass dogs.

I’ve been on a late 19th c novel kick this year; filling in gaps I never read for whatever reason—Trollope, Tolstoy, etc—and I’ve now gotten to Zola, and I have to say, wtf.

Just, you know, educating myself. www.congress.gov/crs-product/...

Hard to not read this in a Robin voice.

The shame. The millennial shame. I should be better than this. I will do better than this.

Jeffrey Epstein‘s approach to punctuation is driving me bonkers.

Remember when they fired the president of Harvard for… two inadequate citations in her 30yo dissertation?

I know SEPTA has a lot going on, but can we talk about how they had an extra-long trolley blitz this summer, and then this weekend closed the tunnel again for more repairs, which are now stretching two days beyond the scheduled date with no end in sight?

I mean, I have some hope that if we develop enough AI bots, eventually they will just talk to each other and leave us humans alone.

I asked about this, and one of our excellent librarians discovered that in fact AI summaries/"Research Assistant" can be switched off at the level of the library. Something to request. support.proquest.com/s/article/Eb...

I try to live life without regrets, but a major regret I have is buying a minivan. One year in and I hate it so much.😭

Weaponizing the practice of “anointing” the way Dr. Kamayama did is antithetical to mainstream Christian theology. This article speaks both to the everyday heresies promoted by many non-denominational churches and also the times reporter’s religious illiteracy! www.nytimes.com/2025/11/11/n...

David McCormick thinking the people he represents in Pennsylvania want more New Yorkers to move here. 😂 www.inquirer.com/politics/nat...

for my colleagues & friends in the American Musicological Society, a small (but big) update about what has transpired at this year’s meeting www.facebook.com/share/p/17Gz...

I’ve been sitting in a plane on the tarmac for about three hours now due to mechanical issues, and they just announced that they are going to try, no joke, turning the plane off and then on again.

Truly the worst part of the AMS organizational drama is the mocking by music theorists…the world is upside down… 😞

Trying to imagine the will-to-alcohol involved in getting to the airport for a 6am flight early enough to have time to sit down at the bar for a few beers.

There was a long line for the dog therapy room at this conference, and I kept hearing applause, and it turned out that the golden retriever was playing a toy piano.

Always struck that musicologists possess some of the most sophisticated knowledge of performance possible, and many/most of us have long careers in performers as musicians or as teachers in the classroom, and yet, when it comes to performing our scholarship at a conference…utter nightmare.

First thing I see when I turn on the tv in a hotel room in Minnesota.

I’m sorry, but no victory tours for Josh Shapiro until we get a state budget. That’s his job, including the part where he figures out how to get leverage over Republicans. (A not-insignificant part of the job for higher office as well.)

Enjoying @ehphd.bsky.social’s #amsmt25 on Prince and the Sex Wars, and thinking about how Susan McClary’s scholarship was so formed by her time in Minneapolis in the 80s, and Prince, and the larger art scene, and attacks from Reaganite women activists like Lynn Cheney, then-head of the NEH.

My favorite detail of this story is RFK immediately ducking out of the room, clearly assuming that whatever happened would be pinned on him, just out of instinct.

The font on these conference badges is insanely small and I am very much a “need a quick reminder to match name and face” kind of guy. 😭