Bill Posters Will be Band

Sadly, I have heard the Bill Posters Will Be Band has closed up shop. Wish I could have seen them play again. The only time I got to see them live was in the Fall of 1986. The photo below is from that gig. They were playing, "Stand by Your Man."

Now this is odd...

Just discovered that I've been cited in a publication last summer by the Office of the President of the United States (from the Council of Economic Advisors, apparently): The Cost of Delaying Action to Stem Climate Change. The problem is, I'm cited as a co-author of an article I never wrote.  The citation in the report is as follows:

Edmonds, Jae, Leon Clarke, John Lurz, and J. Macgregor Wise. 2008. “Stabilizing CO2 Concentrations with Incomplete International Cooperation.” Climate Policy 8, 4: 355- 376.

The citation should have listed M. Wise from the University of Maryland College Park (I presume this is Marshall Wise who is cited a couple of other times with some of these same co-authors, and who is probably pretty ticked off that he got his work cited in a report from the Office of the President and they got his name wrong!).  Here's the original article: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.3763/cpol.2007.0469#.VHalXt51Jz8


So my question is: J. Macgregor Wise is a pretty unique name. J. Macgregor is quite different from "M."  Where did the authors of this report get my name from??  I mean, they even got the lower case "g" at the start of "gregor" (and no one ever gets that one right). It's not like they cited "N. Wise" or committed some other typo--they inserted an almost entirely different name. I'm also not an economist or involved with climate change research. Am I in someone's autocorrect (either the computer software version or their subconscious version)?

Weird.

Stuart Hall, RIP

Two or three nights ago I dreamed I was in London to hear Stuart Hall give a talk. Unfortunately there were the usual oneiric shenanigans and I didn't get further than the lobby. A missed opportunity, I thought at the time. Too true. And now he is gone. But Hall is here in my lecture notes for my freshman media and culture course, and here again in the opening weeks of my grad class in qualitative methods, and here again in the turn of a question, in the wrestle with a theory, in a commitment to think us a bit further down the road, and in the commitment to do work that matters.

I remember sitting in a lecture hall at the University of Illinois, almost a quarter century ago now, listening to Hall give the talk that would become his essay, “Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies,” with its struggles with Althusser and the cry, "Against the urgency of people dying in the streets, what in God's name is the point of cultural studies?”  I remember as well the time I spent that summer with Hall's warm, rich voice resonating in my headset as I transcribed that talk for the subsequent book.

His was what Melissa Gregg once called one of cultural studies’ affective voices. And it will be sorely missed.