This section is about my personal, non-academic interests, of which I’m proud to say there are many.

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music reviewer
ultra-marathon runner
photographer
film
reading
tea

Music reviewer

For a few years as a PhD student I wrote music reviews of experimental, minimalist, ambient, and generally “weird” electronic tunes over at The Sights and Sounds. I enjoyed writing there for a number of reasons, including the fact that it forced me to stay current on the scene, and it was a productive non-academic outlet of creative expression.

Check out what I’m listening to here: Last.fm. Generally, while I listen to a lot of different genres, I’m most into weird, challenging electronic music: drone, glitch, and quiet ambient, for example. But I’m also likely to be playing acoustic indie, dub reggae, shoegaze, goth rock, and 90s college indie, and who doesn’t have a soft spot for Lana del Rey?

Last year (2021) I listened through “The Sound of Everything”, Spotify’s playlist of a song from every genre in their catalogue. There are over 5,500 tracks, and I finished the whole playlist within the year. Here’s what I learned:

1. The playlist was constantly changing, and Spotify adds much, much more than it removes. I frequently compared their list to mine to make sure I was getting everything. I only noticed a few instances where they removed genres, and those were usually country-specific, like when they consolidated the “Irish” genres.
2. The playlist is organized by geography, but not history. I’d estimate that about half the genres are typical styles but given a specific location – Detroit Techno, Mainland Chinese Pop, for instance – but there were absolutely NO genres attributed to a time period like “1970s Classic Rock” or “10th century Gregorian Chant”. The only exception is if the time period has a name like “Baroque”.
3. I’d guess over a third of the genres are Spanish-language, second only to English. I was quite shocked at how many of them are either from Spanish-speaking regions or are completely new genres I’ve never heard of like Pasodobles. This got me wondering where the genres come from – how many of the distinctions are related to the staff working at Spotify? I don’t have an answer for this…
4. Sometimes to my benefit, sometimes to my dismay, each genre only has one track to it, so Spotify’s selection of a representative track still gave me only a very, very limited view of the genre. Some of those with which I was already familiar had odd choices to represent them, which makes me wonder just how much more there is to hear from each genre. Some of them that I hated – would I have loved Spotify’s #2 choice for the genre? No way to know unless I listen to a selection from each genre, which IS. NOT. GOING. TO. HAPPEN.
5. Tons of very surprising genres. Slayer was the only genre dedicated entirely to a band (that I remember), and Therapy was a 1-hour sleep hypnosis track, for instance. And I’ve known about Lowercase for a few years now but was surprised to see its inclusion here since it is really just a handful of artists, not really a genre.
6. I found some gems I really came to love. It seems I still very much enjoy heavy, aggressive music, even though I don’t often listen to it these days. And completely coincidentally but very serendipitously, pretty much anything coming from anywhere on the continent of Africa I really, really loved.

Ultra-marathon runner

I’m an ultra-marathon runner. I can’t wait to have time to run more, but to date I’ve run a 50km (30 miles) and a 50 mile race. Dropped out of my first 100-mile race at mile 65, due to undertraining, in 2021. Came in 3rd for my first marathon, 6th at the 50k, and 157th (out of 400) at the 50-mile. I don’t get out as much as I would like, but running long distances has formed a large part of my identity since about 2013.

While teaching at Temple University, my goal was to run every street in my neighborhood, South Philadelphia. Here’s how I did:

Photography

In 2014 I discovered photography.

Flickr

Film

Just a few names that come to mind:
Ingmar Bergman, Andrei Tarkovsky, David Lynch, Terrence Malick, Jordan Peele, Jean Cocteau, Kenneth Anger, Lynne Ramsay, Wes Anderson, the Coen Brothers, Lars von Trier, Sofia Coppolla, Jean-Luc Godard, Paul Thomas Anderson, Bela Tarr, Steve McQueen

Reading

https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/1706356-ryan

Tea

Favorites: Silver Needle, An Ji Bai Cha, Cold Summit Tung Ting, Cui Feng High Mountain, 2011 Huang Pian, Bi Luo Chun, Yunnan Gold.

White tea in general is probably my favorite tea to drink, but usually only the non-flavored types. White peony is a good example of a well-rounded white tea that has delicate, subtle floral flavors.