Tuesday, November 6, 2007

best double standards story ever.

From my friend Nate, grad student in Japanese Lit:

so this weekend i ended up going to the big j-lit conference at
P****... in any case though, the reason im writing - a bit long
so bear with me.

so during the conference, there was a panel on hokkaido ...
afterwards, during the q and a, this woman raises her hand

and makes a very post-colonialy comment about "dont you think its
messed up to call the panel voices FROM hokkaido, when the actual
voices from hokkaido are ainu who are not represented, etc etc".

then, like ten minutes later, during the next panel, the same woman's
phone rings. now, i would imagine its embarassing enough to have your
phone go off in the middle of one of your colleagues' talk, with
everyone in your entire field looking at you, etc.

but here's the thing:

her ringtone was THE SONG.

you know. blekka dekka dek dek dek-dek dekkk.

can you imagine being a professor of japanese literature who just got
outed to every other professor of japanese literature as having the
cheesiest orientalist song play everytime you get a call.

I've obviously elided certain details to protect a few identities, but you get the picture.
And the song. What is that song called anyway and who originated it?

3 comments:

Ryan S said...

I just scoured Google for like 5 minutes of straight keyword searches and couldn't find ANYTHING on that melody. You should have seen some of these search strings!

Shocking.

Anonymous said...

This piqued my interest, and a quick search turned up this page:
http://chinoiserie.atspace.com/index.html
There doesn't seem to be a smoking gun, as it were. Lots of variations around from the mid to late 1800's to about the 1950's, when the generic asian theme seems to have more or less settled in. There's some other links available if you search Wikipedia under "Asian Riff."

Assholier Than Thou said...

try harder:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_Riff