I got back from the 2011 EMP Pop Conference at UCLA late Sunday night, oblivious of who had won the Oscar statuettes being handed out just a few miles from where I spent the weekend. I've had a 15-year gradual slide away from movies, but that lack of interest felt particularly apropos relative to where I am with music, my interest there waxing as much as my interest in movies has waned. I am not the typical presenter at the Pop Conference-- I'm not an academic, I'm not a professional musician, and I don't think about or write or sell music for a living. (Not much of one, anyway.) As Chuck Klosterman said during his presentation (and I'm paraphrasing here), Pop Conference folks do not have anything resembling a normal relationship to music. Despite the fact that I've been writing about family music here for 6 1/2 years, I think my relationship with music is mostly normal. On the upper edge of "normal," perhaps, but normal nonetheless. (My wife might disagree.) All in all, I might have been closer to the UCLA students registered for the conference than the other presenters in terms of knowledge. But given that I have presented at SXSW and I'm going back to Kindiefest, I thought it might be useful to recap what I did this weekend so that my readers (many of whom I tend to think of as also being on that upper edge of "normal," if not beyond it) can see what it's like to be amongst a group of music obsessives for 48+ hours while listening to comparatively little music. I arrived in Los Angeles early Friday afternoon, greeted by rain, a long line at the rental car counter, and traffic that can only be described as snarled. The combination of rain, poor highways, Oscar-swollen traffic, and early Friday rush hour meant that it took about an hour to drive the 13-14 miles from LAX to UCLA, which meant that I missed the first set of panels. The basic structure of the panels remained the same throughout the weekend -- one moderator in charge of keeping time and asking questions in case the audience didn't have them, and three or four presenters who used Powerpoint or video or audio to help make their case. The moderators didn't always enforce time strictly, but there was rarely a time when I felt like the panel didn't have enough time. I wasn't entirely sure what to expect in putting together my own presentation, so I was glad to have the opportunity to hear (and see) others present their papers.