12/31/2025 As I sit in my hotel room in Milwaukee, doing the last-minute paperwork, I am reminded of how much I have improved on my current priorities. Life is never perfect, and that is just a fact of life. What has been especially inspirational is finding the roots of my upbringing in Deerfield, IL, that led to a host of social circumstances that now entangle me with everything that is the jamband subcultural scene. I have also been going out to see the excellent jamband from Arizona, "Spafford".
I have seen these guys here and there, and they totally bring something that most bands in the jam scene hesitate which is to own the sound that is unique to the jamband as a genre, thinking about the Grateful Dead, for example, as a catalog of a traditional repetoire more so than a "cover", as if it were a jazz standard. In this way, they are leading one of the finest revivals in their music (qualitatively speaking, here, not wanting to jump into peripheral conversation that is the arduous touring for musicians and all sorts of difficulties). COVID-19 choked the life out of live music.
Spafford has been so special because it is the same people who are in the crowd from like-minded folks that I saw over the Dogs in a Pile residency in Chicago's finest venue, "Garcia's." Seeing Spafford brings me back to a place that is both new and familiar, as my actual three-degree circle of friends in high school, of which one is now also a fellow educator who is an excellent pedagogue whom I respect so much. After all, I don't know how to actually teach that well, and am still working hard to improve at delivering the substantive matters rather than digressing adjacent. The ties that I have with my friends through Phish all reconnected the small dots of experiences and recognition that are essential to community building.
This is precisely why the article, "The Strength of the Weak Ties" by Mark Granovetter, also connects, along with the notion of Simmel's "Stranger" that is articulated in the work of Rebecca Adams, which highlights the role of this precise role distance as a way that human connections are, in my interpretation, facilitated more straightforwardly and genuinely. Seeing Spafford has been a return to the familiar as it is new. I am reconnecting and connecting. I am learning to accept the new within my framing of what has been, but carefully not to map the previous constructs as I saw them as uniform and universal. This is the approach that is refracting out from the music played by Spafford, ranging from Billy Cobham covers to Herbie Hancock. Their originals are highly prog-rock and eclectic, and jams that go on for half an hour. Sometimes it is just a single song setlist. It is a pretty wild amount of improvisation. I wish I had one more night of this work, then seeing music, but I realize there will be plenty of this in my classroom as well as after. Music will continue to ground what endeavors I have lined up for 2026. Wishing everyone all the same in ringing in the new year, despite the enduring times it has been. We all make it to the other side of the tunnel.
Happy New Year!
(Will have the references corrected and put in accurately below soon).
12/18/2025 (12/31/2025, grammatically corrected the post and mostly changes in Mechanics. I will try to remember putting in references as linked source). The semester is over! And what an occasion that was. My first semester at Marquette has been nothing but amazing, warts and all. Literally connecting back with my roots in Chicago, finding old friends in new contexts, and seeing a plethora of amazing music is healing my soul. This is essential to what I want to demonstrate as a primary importance in any social groups: the group position in which it sits within, and sometimes against, society. And this sort of group conformity can foster a sense of collectivity, in what Emile Durkheim identified as "collective consciousness."
The subgroups in which the cultural medium sits, primarily, in my inference, are music, which is demonstrative of this dichotomous and dialectical relationship between community (groups) and society. Music, therefore, sits somewhere between what people care about and see as an epiphenomenon, and the key to understanding this amazing medium of art that refracts the group values in aesthetics is music. It's there when you need it, and everyone has an idea about it, which means it is highly subjective, yet because of the ways that it is performed and played, it straddles the tension between erudite productivity and genuine human creativity (in the Foucauldian sense, as in nothing is new in the genuine sense of the word).
As I gear up to finish off the last few projects this year, I have found myself in a spot where I am reconnecting with myself from 10 years ago. This is really reflected in a song I have been passionately listening to by the Korean duo artist DAVICHI, called "Time Capsule." This song references how one might look at oneself when one's young self sees the grown-up self. This song tethered what I have been emotionally feeling right now, and generally maps what my next inspiration is coming from. I am returning to the same old guy who was playing out at a Tuesday night open jam in front of a tough crowd (all musicians, much more capable than I could ever be). I am relating as an audience member in seeing a constant stream of music. And one thing I cannot put a scientific explanation on is that I am no longer truly exhausted. I am energized daily by music.
Striding the lines between an artist who writes words and melodies, a teacher who tries to learn from his students about new ways of conceptualizing emerging cultural phenomena, and having humility for my fellow colleagues in both academia and music. Seeing this in such light has "shocked and persuaded my soul to ignite."
If you are a Marquette-affiliated person reading this, I wish you the best Gift of Time. We return sharply and even more lucid in 2026. I cannot WAIT to teach next semester. Also, shout out to the most memorable comment on my teaching evaluation this year:
"10/10, Big Dawg."
I will be adding the citations later, but for a shorthand, Emile Durkheim's "Elementary Forms...", Michel Foucault's "The Birth of Biopolitics...", and finally, my own article on jambands + subcultural scene with Brunsma and Chapman, which can be accessed here.
12/1/2025 (very tired, at late-night writing session). I think it is perfectly controversial and in my musical opinion, and probably the student who sparked this notion, that Mac Miller was among the greats in the 27 club, sort of proves that Eric Clapton, who was largely forgotten about my student population, is significantly less musical than who Mac Miller was. This is a ramble I needed to record, and is a use of my free speech that is both academic and musical. I do think that this is true in many regard about music and the separation or distinction between creativity and utility.
11/13/25 (edited 11/14/25 for mechanics and flow, with addition of missing citation for Harrison 2009) What a semester this has been! In my free time, I have been absorbing as much as possible the music coming out of Chicago, Milwaukee, and nearby cities (from Hiromi Uehara to Joanna Connor, amazing musicians that are absolutely jaw-dropping). I have finally found my muse, which has been music. Just as teaching is a practice I find rewarding when folks bring their 50 percent and I bring mine, at Marquette, even at the tail end of the semester, I have seen people bringing 60 percent despite not expecting such enthusiasm. This reverberates joy, and that precisely is what Cura Personalis entails. I am slated to teach a course on all of this. My publications regarding music and jambands in particular are of interest. It is at the nexus of everything that I was in Chicago in the 2010s: a musician (not a great one, obviously). Reconnecting with that root has been refreshing because I am revisiting that past with renewed interest, and that is sustaining everything that teaching, research, and service entail. I am thrilled to witness aspects of real-life civic discourse in the discussions every Friday. Whether seeing a jam from students or from my new favorite jamband, Dogs in a Pile (https://dogsinapile.com/), it makes hardly any difference (well, some sonically speaking). I am trying to do the same thing, which is to listen. And as Wynton Marsalis famously stated, the musician, the orator, or more precisely the communicator of meaning, is the "first listener."
This is what reflexive Sociology and Criminology does. It sees things from the perspective of what Pierre Bourdieu argued as "structuring structures..." This is to say that we exist as products of our environment, and when we enter a field (see Habitus by Bourdieu 1984), this embodiment of culture carries within it the meaning of the said environment and conditions where it plays out in everyday settings and interactions (Bourdieu 1984; Goffman 1956). This structures a community, as we do things in groups to belong and to be seen. Being seen within your strata, your environment: a kid who grew up in Deerfield, Illinois, is finding the familiar. Seeing this through music has been amazing because art mimics life, and given my previous research on jambands and racial dynamics, I never felt so alone going to shows in the South. My return to the old watering hole (I don't drink anymore), aliveOne, led me to this awesome jazz group, Bonzo Squad's (https://bonzosquad.com/about) residency. All of this eventually culminated in the Dogs in a Pile residency at a new place (for me), Garcia's, a venue that hosts amazing musical acts in the jamband subgenre (I despise calling it this, but apples and oranges, although both are fruit). This has opened and is opening new doors for how I am reinventing myself as a scholar-teacher. The course I am about to teach next semester will precisely reflect on this. No one is exceptional, and we are all copies of each other in one way or another. I was truly right when I wrote on a board in a humanities course (I cannot remember if it was philosophy or anthropology) at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, exactly about 16 years ago. The question asked something to the effect of what is a community or subculture that has endured. I wrote "Deadheads" on the chalkboard. Another student, who was wearing a shirt that said "STS9," crossed mine off and wrote "music." After all these years, I believe that I am quite right. Apples are not oranges. And it means something significant to see something like what I imagine a Grateful Dead tour in the early 1980s to have been, through musicians as old as my students, Dogs in a Pile, which has captivated my creative attention. I seriously did not fathom that a scene as white as jambands could be this inclusive, where I was plastered on the livestream and their Instagram page (I was enjoying their show at Detroit, MI), and I felt some way about that (tokenism, if you will). I was proven wrong as they seriously appreciate the presence of Asian folks in their scene, with set break music finally including East Asian music.
Modern Asian music is phenomenal. Many great things are happening in Southeast Asia, but I will save that for the next post. In Korea, Sumin + Slom. Japan is bursting with amazing jazz and bluegrass (there is a major Grateful Dead scene, along with a healthy dose of Phish scene, given the latter's famous Fukuoka show in 2000: Live Phish Volume 4). This transnational ties to Asia, jamband, my renewed sense of what it means to be an Asian person in 2025 (I will definitely deposit this as socio-political dynamics happening will take an entire day of rambling), is finally feeling that one thing human beings are in search of: recognition. I feel accepted and loved. I reverberate the same positivity. To see, for example, the way that Brian Murray (guitar, Dogs in a Pile) plays old aesthetics with new approaches is simply so refreshing and inspiring. This directly translates to what I am embarking on now. In the coming year, I will be merging this time a third space (Soja 1996) for this (I don't have a name for it or way to articulate it yet that is specific), which traverses notions of what Kwame Harrison saw as a sonic space of inclusion and where all boundaries of class, race, gender, suspends in the cacophony of sounds.
This band has brought a renewed sense of commitment to the jamband scene. Dogs in a Pile! I am so thrilled to return home, where I would listen to live Grateful Dead show curation by the famous Dick Latvala, called "Dicks Picks." I particularly enjoyed the first one, which led me to my favorite Grateful Dead show of all time: 11/11/73 in Winterland. This era of the Dead, along with what I also imagine to be Phish in 1990-2, is what I see in Dogs in a Pile. I don't see yet all the underbelly of awful things that go on when the scene gets big (again, for my Criminology students, you increase the sample size, you will find crime, it's a matter of time). I see people coming to get their cups filled, to be loved, to be accepted, and ultimately, to be recognized for who they are. Without judgment during the music, when "your soul joins mine," and where "all my friends, come backwards down the number line." And with all of this, I am thrilled to be headed to another show. To be inspired once more. To see life breathing and communicating as it builds community. And you will know when you are there, that "our love is real, not fade away."
"See you, space cowboy."
I think that's enough references for today! See the academic ones below:
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Harrison, Anthony Kwame. 2009. Hip Hop Underground: The Integrity and Ethics of Racial Identification. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Soja, Edward W. 1996. Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
8/25/2025* around midnight! Sometimes things do not go 100 percent our way. In fact, this is all too common. Erving Goffman often pointed to how we work as a team to save face and ensure that "the show must go on." We navigate intricate interactional moments across various contexts. This is precisely why I need teaching to fuel my art. My art of debate, then, is not about "winning" or "losing," but about working as a team. It is what Sociologists call, to a large degree, "Functionalism." Consensus lies at the very heart of my favorite bands, such as Phish. I love them not because they are a party, but because they represent the culmination of modern music. The jams, like the longest Tweezer I witnessed in St. Louis last year, or recently, the 30-minute "What's Going Through Your Mind" jam at the United Center, were sublime. They achieved this sublimity because these four master communicators seemingly effortlessly modulate from minor to major keys, dissolve into Type II jams, and build using the same middle coil pickup that echoes Jerry Garcia's iconic builds. This is not one person screaming their ego. It is consensus-building and community-building. Jazz artists embody this same spirit and essentially innovated the improvisational approach. While Wynton Marsalis famously said "you are the first listener" when referring to music, Branford pushed boundaries with his Grateful Dead sit-ins, improvising from E major 7 to B minor solo segments that turned upside down into tornadoes of cascading notes in the song, "Eyes of the World". In this way, I can see it: one must try to build consensus because, as Rawls argued (despite being somewhat antiquated at this point in history), we are trying to exist as a democratic society. This is especially crucial at a time when expertise is losing its symbolic value through what I call the "Hype" economy. Who cares? I think I do. We should all care more. That would make consensus-building much more powerful than my own personal contributions to what could be called a serious "frame alignment process" toward social change. -JWK
Notes: Edited for date and time accuracy + minor subject-verb agreement errors on 8/26/2025 at 5:34 PM
8/20/2025 The Hype and FOMO economy of the "Generative AI" Industrial Complex It is sometimes unbelievable how a simple answer could be - (I am using emdash because I have used them before this "Generative AI" "boom"). As Karen Hao (2025) observes, AI is akin to what Durkheim argued in the "Elementary Forms of Religious Life." Belief and hype are a group effort, no matter how terrible or wonderful, and it is definitely with this in mind that Silicon Valley believes in Generative AI in terms of its agentic abilities.
If Sociologists are to understand culture, it is of utmost importance to see this technology through a lens to "understand." Invoking some of these fundamental - as well as basic - Sociological insights (via Durkheim + Weber + Marx), companies are running on precisely the hype economy of speculating what might happen with (that is, the VC) Generative AI. It's succeeding, and I am not sure if such a scale is needed day in and day out. A simple translation from Korean to English - and English to Korean - has made my life a lot easier as a 1.5 gen Korean American. I can communicate hyper-specific ideas with my family in Korea. At the same time, I worry about the precarity of English teachers in Korea. I remember performing that job for a month (less) and walking away. Maybe I didn't have the discipline I do today. Maybe it was just the 6-7 hours of teaching in a row without any breaks over 5 minutes. These classes were an hour long.
To track back to my main point, and in thinking about this writ large - so quite broadly, a haphazard middle-ranged theory if you will - is that the general economic modality runs on hype. Just think about the latest "drop shipping" to serious problems with meme coins. More can be seen in video games - microtransactions are getting so ridiculous. Now, it is just about every business using Generative AI to solve problems, experiencing that they are hallucinating on such a big scale. For example, I got 10 calls from my credit card company that I needed to change my address after moving. I already changed my address after their second call. These computing structures are simply not good enough at scaling this big.
But, again, with positivity in mind, they are absolutely possible to solve amazing tasks with hyper-specific tasks in pattern recognition. Just as the human mind should, using the parts of ourselves that are overperforming to boost or to cover (mostly for my story here), is precisely what makes the human mind so artistic. I love this in jazz - I was listening to Scofield + Martino + DeFrancisco jamming on "Sunny" on my drive home today from the campus, and marveled at how different their brains sounded. All three taking solos were immediately different, using the same language of modes, scales, and phrases of the classic song, "Sunny." Then, if neural networking is, as the experts claim it is, why are we using this incredible computing power for such frivolous, capitalistic use leading to cognitive offloading? With this, an ESL student like myself can have a better shot at a system that is not built for them. With this hyper-specific equipment, COVID-19 vaccines were simulated and tested, and experimental designs can be possible (I have more to say on this, but I am holding it in). I don't really buy the "doomer" perspective because that is so, well, nihilistic.
As Jerry Garcia plays, an error in a phrase turns into an inside joke, and the guy unleashed after that error so hard, it was what made 1972-3, 1976-8 (parts of 78 are not so good, but it is what it is) magical to listen to. A volley of notes that were so creative just "blossomed and became." I think if AI were used in this way, maybe we can find a way to 1. mitigate this monstrous use of water and environmental degradation; and 2. actually solve the problems that we as human beings are actively trying to solve, like cancer, vaccines, social and mental well-being, solving so many problems that are related to and caused by capitalism, and so on.
Maybe it's a late day today. Maybe it's the long week. Maybe it's Maybelline (c). All we can do is to continue to articulate as pacifists, believing in a better future. "Keep what's important, and know who's your friend." Doomspending won't solve any fundamentals.
-JWK (I am going to sign off like this, so it's not absurdly letter-like).
8/12/2025 Following up on my previous post with Spiderweb Capitalism My longtime colleague from graduate school, Professor Lipon Mondal, has always impressed me with his work on land grabbing, a topic I largely neglected in my own research. Lately, I’ve been revisiting this subject through the groundbreaking lens of Professor Kimberly Kay Hoang, who uses the metaphor of a spiderweb to describe the networked flows of capital. Hoang’s framework captures not only the spread of money and power but also the way gendered and racialized norms circulate, like viral memes, across these networks.
If we apply Professor Hoang’s logic to urban spatial displacement, the parallels are hard to ignore. Displacement moves in angular, patterned bursts (Harvey 2001), reshaping neighborhoods in ways that place immense wealth next to extreme precarity. On my regular drives through the city, I’ve watched tent encampments rise in areas where I once jogged as a graduate student at DePaul University. Lincoln Park, never affordable, has now become even more exclusionary, its transformation tracing the same spiderweb-like structure of inequality. Wealth consolidates, public space evaporates, and neoliberal individualism becomes the default urban ethic. Midtown Manhattan’s erasure of simple public seating mirrors Skid Row’s adjacency to high-end lofts for young professionals. The spatial juxtaposition is almost theatrical in its cruelty and global/transnational in its scale, ranging from just about every major city in the globe or what Sassen articulated as "the Global City." Also, as my own work has shown ad nauseam, the United States is an empire in decline with racial and segregationist dynamics play out with ubiquitously, even at the most interactional levels in transnational contexts.
Here is the counterpoint: Yet, while the “spiderweb displacement” metaphor captures the interconnectedness of capital flows as Professor Hoang observed in the Frontier Markets in Vietnam, it can obscure the fact that urban space is contested and mutable, and that these networks often struggle to fully consolidate. You can simply look to the work of Professor Deborah Gould. ACT UP was a movement I did not witness, yet it remains enduring because it rearticulated some of the epidemiological and irrational, anti-scientific fears during the COVID-19, while having an effect of further exacerbated homophobia and transphobia in the "Post-Pandemic" era where rent controlled neighborhoods are increasingly disappearing. This also implicates the political ecology as Brenner and Ghosh (2022) argued: The urban renewal is not only global, it is referred to as a planetary endeavor. Nevertheless, residents, activists, and policymakers can disrupt these patterns through rent control, community land trusts, anti-displacement zoning, and public housing expansion. By framing the dynamic as a web, we might unconsciously reinforce the idea that displacement is a natural, unstoppable force, when in fact it can be slowed, redirected, or dismantled through deliberate political action. I always tell myself, folks couldn't vote that made Civil Rights happen. We can do this if we all are feeling the same thing. We know it is wrong to displace human lives, and if not morally convinced, I would implore the following: Ending the homelessness crisis means making housing affordable. Subsidize it.
Note: Edits to grammar and editorial corrections on the connections between the irrational and moral-based fears connecting to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020s and the AIDS crisis in 1980s. Additions of more readings by David Harvey (2001) and Brenner and Ghosh (2002) (8/13/2025 12:38PM).
8/11/2025 Hi everyone, I’ve just returned home to the North Shore Chicagoland Area/Milwaukee. I have been away almost a decade, and the city feels… different. Some of the changes are exciting, others are worrying, and most are a mix of both.
Familiar Places, Strangely Unfamiliar Walking through the East Side, Brady Street, and the Historic Third Ward, I still see the buildings I know, but the rhythm feels altered. More upscale shops, boutique coffee spots, and glossy murals signal a city attracting new waves of professionals and investment. We used to call Milwaukee “Milwookie” after the hippie nomenclature that reflected the dominant populations at the time - My generation of working-class hippies and hipsters of the 2010s.
The Price of Living Here Milwaukee was once among the most affordable cities in the U.S. That’s shifting fast:
Home prices have jumped 14–20% year-over-year, depending on the source.
Milwaukee is now one of the most rent-burdened city in the Midwest, with many renters spending over a third of their income on housing.
These changes mean opportunity for some, but real strain for others.
Urban Renewal and Gentrification Gentrification is no longer a future concern — it’s here. Between 2000 and 2010, about 16% of Milwaukee’s poorest census tracts gentrified, including areas like Walker’s Point and Bronzeville. Redevelopment can breathe life into neighborhoods, but it also risks pushing out the communities that shaped them. I left the Midwest Right around this era (2016 to be exact) and thought rent could still be in three digits. Holding Onto Optimism: Cura Personalis I’m concerned about displacement and the erosion of Milwaukee’s working-class diversity. But I’m also hopeful.
City leaders are experimenting with anti-displacement plans and community-led development strategies. If done right, we could see a city that grows without forgetting its roots. Coming back, I feel nostalgic and critical, but also optimistic. Milwaukee can evolve in a way that welcomes new life while honoring the people and history that built it. To pursue this end as a Marquette faculty, and as a community, is to fulfill our goals in maintaining a sustainable community, that is to care for others, a key Jesuit value: Cura personalis.
Sincerely,
Dr. Joong Won Kim
Note: has been edited with minor updates to formatting on 8/12/2025 at 9:56 PM.