Man. It's like the US is taking lessons in colonial administration straight from the fucking British Raj.

The Onion takes on Outsourcing

Favorite Catullus Moment in a Smiths song:



"I want to live and I want to love"

-in "Frankly, Mr Shankly," off The Queen is Dead

One great thing about being back in New York is that here, music stores don't keep their hip hop sections in glass cases - you can actually browse. Don't get me wrong, i think Cutler's is a great store. The folks who work there know their music and love to talk to folks about music, and if i were staying in New Haven (and weren't organizing) i would love to work there. But keeping the hip hop section behind glass is totally unjustifiable. It constructs hip hop and hip hops fans, through a racialized lens, as criminal. In New Haven, a city which is 44% African American and 20% Latino/a, Cutlers, which now sits at the gentrified heart of Yale's post-urban yuppie amusement park, instates and performs the logics of the exclusionary architecture of Bruce Alexander's wildest dreams. There are more pressing fights to be waged, certainly, but i think people who shop at Cutlers should let the folks there know that you aren't happy about this.

except i was never very smiley. And i didn't go to graduation. But otherwise the resemblance is uncanny!

There's something very strange about watching "Office Space" on the Lifetime Movie Network. (Though maybe that's just because it reminds me of the fact that i am not working.)

Time Magazine: In the room where Clinton got blow jobs, Bush fetishizes conquest.

"Jews don't cross Picket Lines"

CCA's Bonita Grubbs has an interesting piece about rent and housing in today's Register. Yale, for one, would do well to listen to her admonition that

Fifth, at the federal level, Congress has authorized cuts in the Section 8 program, which furnishes rent subsidies for 2 million of the country’s most vulnerable families. This change has caused one financial institution to scrap an innovative home mortgage program aimed at promoting home ownership through Section 8. And, the bond market has lost faith in Section 8-related programs.



Sixth and finally, the amount of emphasis on homeownership has increased and affordability has, in some cases, become synonymous with being a first-time homebuyer. As a condominium owner, I am aware of the multiple benefits of homeownership. I just know that not everyone wants to or is able to purchase and maintain a house or condominium.



There should be a variety of housing options, not just those that favor homeownership.

Grubbs identifies gentrification as a key problem and suggests some solutions to the city's housing crisis:

Reducing rents for people who are poor is a good start; some individuals have even started talking about rent control.



Establishing a policy of one-to-one replacement housing that is rental housing is another idea.



Increasing or shifting funding so that a wider variety of housing options can be available to New Haven residents is also worth exploring.



Producing units that are rental and affordable is the most important strategy, though. Then, as one person who testified at this month’s aldermanic hearing said, those who are poor will no longer feel as if they are being chased out of New Haven.

Back in the '70s, New Haven faced a similar housing crisis. Community activists made explicit connectios between Yale's removal of property from the tax rolls and demolition of residential and apartment buildings in its development schemes and the dearth of affordable housing. With the victory of the extension of the homebuyer program to Fair Haven and West Rock, this sounds like a clarion call for New Haven activists to revisit and rethink not only the city's policies towards housing, (Grubbs argues that the city puts too much emphasis on home ownership and not enough on affordable rents. Her evidence is anecdotal but plausible.) but also the ways in which Yale's presence and its actions in the communityhave made rents rise beyond affordability. In 1973 (i think) the Yale Faculty voted to encourage the university to replace every housing unit lost through its expansion. That would be a start.

Kill Bill Vol 1. is certainly visually alluring. I think the accolades proclaiming the film 'genius' are somewhat exaggerated, though. I enjoyed both Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. I even liked Jackie Brown. Granted, the second half of the film's supposed to be better, but KB1 seems like a two hour long chain of racist tropes of difference followed by exhilarating smooth and beautiful cinematography. Uma Thurman is fantastic, and it's hard to malign Tarantino's skill at crafting beautiful, haunting, sexy images. Still, i have a hard time sorting out what's at stake in the racialized undertones of Tarantino's brilliantly stylized images of gore and campy referencing of hong kong action films, 70's "blaxploitation," and James Bond movies. I need to think more about this, i guess.

In New York, having moved out of my apartment and into my parents'. More blogging to follow.

A little belated, (I'm not in the habit of reading YaleGlobal Online too often, though Wallerstein's critique of Niall Ferguson is kinda fun,) but here's Seth Fein on Al-Hurra and empire:

Al-Hurra's development suggests less an expression of Middle Eastern public opinion from below than Washington's messages from above



Even as U.S. foreign policy touts its version of globalization – as a dialectical relationship between free trade and free thought – it moves outside the market to marginalize disruptive mass-media perspectives created by the very international interplay of supply and demand that it panegyrically trumpets. In doing so, it strikingly diminishes the rhetoric President Bush invoked in last January's State of the Union speech, when he asked Congress “to double the budget of the National Endowment for Democracy” in order to help the Middle East develop, among other things, “free markets” and a “free press.” The static produced by the contradictions between Washington's current international broadcasting ventures and its neoliberal ideology seems to replay the 1960s, when the United States Information Agency's unattributed TV activities in Latin America flouted modernization theory's promise that capitalist reforms would deliver democracy and sovereignty as well as economic development and social progress to “third world” countries. What “modernization” was to cold war liberalism during the 1960s “globalization” has been to post-cold war neoliberalism since the 1990s. In each era, Washington's deployment of international television has disregarded the tenets of the official ideology it broadcasts.

Josh convincingly channels Eric Alterman and looks at the Times's conservative bias in its hawkish support of the Iraq war, withdrawn only with the downfall of the recent collapse of the Chalabi-Cheney axis of deception. (Speaking of which, Iyad Alawi, Iraq's new premier-select, in the NYT's words "is the secretary general of the Iraqi National Accord, an exile group that has received funds from the Central Intelligence Agency. His ties with the C.I.A., and his closeness to the United States could become an issue in a country where public opinion has grown almost universally hostile to the Americans." This seems like an understatement. The puppet show's only just begun and already we can see the strings all too well.)



And I'm looking forward to Alyssa's promised posts on Chile, particularly in light of Pinochet's recent loss of his lifetime immunity to persecution - though i agree with Josh that justice isn't served unless all those responsible for the terrorist military coup and the violence, torture, murder, and oppression which followed, as well as the country's neoliberal restructuring under the watchful eyes of the Chicago school, are made responsible for their crimes.



My brother, Lev (formerly self-designated "Levster, Master of Disaster"), expert in all things Odinist and Death Metal, assures me that the Rohirrim are in fact based on the Scythians, some of whom, he claims, "looked nordic," while others, he assures me, had "asian features." I'll revisit my classicist roots, exercise a little praeteritio, and skip berating my brother for his reification of racial phenomics. But the fact is, those dudes playing the Rohirrim aren't Scythians, because no one has called him or herself a Scythian in many, many years. And Jackson's understanding of a Scythian nevertheless seems deeply raicalized to me. Lev also calls me a dork for blogging so much about Tolkien. So i'll shut up.



This will probably be my last blog entry before leaving New Haven at 11:30 tomorrow morning, so if that's the case, i guess i should say farewell to the city i've lived in for the last four years. It's been a pretty intense four years. New Haven's an amazing place, part of me wishes i were staying, and like I told the YDN (no links or pics cause the site is of course down,) in September, i'm coming back to get arrested whenever they want me to, so it won't be the last time i set foot here by any means. I feel lucky and honored to have had the privilege of doing the organizing i did when i was here and working with this amazing movement to fight for a better future for cities, universities, hospitals, and schools. Ok, enough babbling from me - cue the montage!

No blogging today, since i'm too busy packing my life into little boxes in preparation for tomorrow's move.

PHISH BREAKS UP:



(People who actually like Music rejoice.)

Disturbing News



CNN reports:

But the breakdowns at some colleges, particularly along racial lines, are alarming. Of the 772 four-year schools with student bodies that are at least 5 percent black, nearly 40 percent graduated fewer than 30 percent of their black students. Sixty-eight schools, or nearly 10 percent, graduated under 10 percent.

This is clearly disturbing. (And Yale's refusal to sufficiently guarantee grants to low-income families instead of subjecting them to debt to fund education isn't helping.) The article recognizes that

the obstacles to degree completion often have little to do with students' college experience.



"Some of them have to go home and get a job to care for their families," she said.

Then why are administrators like this one:

He said the system wants to produce more prepared students, close a race gap, and simply make room for the hundreds of thousands of students the system must accommodate in the coming years.



"We need their seats," Meredith said. "We need to get them in, get them out, and get them to work."

seeking to adress the problem with formulaic bureaucratized taylorization of student's lives rather than a commitment to the kinds of structural change we need in colleges and universities as well as the communities in which they're situated to ensure that people aren't denied acces to education?





Effluvia:

I'm bemused If slightly baffled) by Evan's unexplained spaceballs reference. And i think Phoebe is ragging on me for being unemployed.

Queer Eye (of Sauron?) for the Bachelor Hobbit (okay, that was dumb and i apologize)

A quick addendum to the recent spate of posts Tolkien-related:



I don't think Evan's point about Sam's "sublimated same-sex desire for Frodo" is "reading far too much into things." Though i'm not entirely convinced that his incessant optimism is the product of said sublimated desire, the presence of such tension is more than evident, particularly in Jackson's films, and merits more attention than i've given it.



In other news, The Times apologizes for its complacent apologia of Bush administration fabrications about Iraq's nonexistent Weapons of Mass Destruction, while it looks like President Brodhead will have a number of Weapons of Class Instruction to contend with down in Durham.



Over in Stamford, the corporate heart of toney Fairfield County, 109 Nursing Home Workers are on a three day strike

The union accuses Stamford Health System of trying to force its workers to accept limited health insurance or trying to get rid of the union altogether.



"This three-day job action is based on their unfair labor practices," Chernoff said. "They have threatened to fire people for exercising their legal right to strike."



The health system has refused to discuss a contract unless the workers agree to their terms, she said.



"It is going to be very difficult for us to reach an agreement if they will not sit down at the negotiating table," Chernoff said.

Plus: The multiplicity of meanings of Che Guevara, and check out Phoebe's fantastic update of the UOC website, which almost brings the whole thing up to speed for 2004. What's particularly cool are the updated History section and the flyers available for download, including the much sought-after Community in Crisis Volume 2



Phoebe writes,

As the 2004-05 school year approaches, janitors, secretaries, scientists, clergy, dining hall workers, elected officials, cooks, patient-care associates, researchers, radiology techs, and (yes) undergraduates are poised to drastically reshape the way our University works, for the better.

Don't forget Alumnae/i!

Evan points to the question of Tolkien's antifacism - which was certainly linked to his Catholicism - to refute my charge that Jackson's Rohirrim are "Aryan gods." I regret my crude phrasing. But it's still clear to me that Tolkien's particular structure of mourning for a Europe all but destroyed by the ravages of the Third Reich was contingent on a privileging of Europe and the European which necessitated the kinds of representations of "the non-European" which we find in the Lord of The Rings as well as the Silmarillion, which I haven't read since i was in eighth grade, and of which my memory has dimmed over the ensuing eight and a half years, (so i thank Evan for his excellent points about the lineage of the Rohirrim and the House of Éorl. Reading the books as a child, i remember my consternation at the lack of "normal people" anywhere in the human world. I think Evan's point that the Rohirrim to some extent constitute this population is important and compelling.) And if Tolkien's Rohirrim are not Aryanized, which i'll certainly concede, I'm not particularly certain that this means Jackson's aren't. The scene with Theoden in Jackson's Two Towers which i mentioned in my last post articulates a masculinist relations between war and the nation which is all too evocative of the language of the fascist imaginary.



As for Sam Gamgee, while the "thoroughly proletarian" comment was tongue in cheek, i do think Sam is, throughout the books, the voice of not only a pastoral wisdom inherited from his "Gaffer," but also a site at which Tolkien articulates a critique of modernity, war, and fascism from the viewpoint of a literal "little person." The transformation of middle earth, and the Scouring of the Shire corresponds to the violence and trauma wrought by the war and its aftermath on the lives of British workers as well as those on the Continent, and if Sam's voice is that of a rural farmer in a bucolic village, his "shock and awe" at the horrors he and Frodo encounter as they journey to the corrupt heart of that which was once Gondolin, beacon of civilization and artifice, (unless i'm totally mistaken, which is very possible,) might be read as chronicling the violence of these seismic shifts.

David Dellinger, 1916-2004

Jacob notes the passing of David Dellinger and points to Ron Jacobs's piece at Counterpunch

I met Dellinger almost exactly three years ago, when he came to a Yale reunion (he was class of 1936). It was about the time I was (to quote a friend) "collecting old leftists." (Moe Foner, also now dead, was among my collection also. Surprisingly, the original member of my collection, my own grandfather, seems to be longest surviving. Note that the term is "old leftists" as in aged, not Old Left, although to some extent they go together.) As I just wrote to his wife, Dellinger was inspiring, approachable, and supportive of Alumni for a Better Yale, which I was then founding. Dellinger has inspired many generations of Yale activists, and I suspect his memory will inspire several more.

Lest we forget, Dellinger's first arrest came at a Yale union protest in the 1930s.

I was struck, rereading The Fellowship of the Ring sophomore year for the ninth time (the first since junior high school,) by the racialized language Evan notes in his blog today. I had initially felt upon seeing Peter Jackson's adaptation of the first book in the saga, with Galadriel's opening admonition that "The World Is Changed," striking something of a chord only three months after Spetember 11th, that Jackson exagerated already extant imperial constructions of "The West", "The East," and "The South" portraying the struggle of "Men" against the enemy as one of civilization against barbarism, of "christian" against "arab" or "muslim." Jackson's take on "The Two Towers," released as the Bush administration stood poised to invade Iraq, and in particular i'm thinking of the jarring scene, full of sharp cuts and camera angles, in which "Theoden-king" (and i am not fully convinced by Evan's argument that the Rohirrim constitute the everyman - Tolkien repeatedly references their lineage and Jackson depicts them as Aryan gods on horseback raining death upon infidels and interlopers,) dons his armor and prepares to meet Saruman's army of threatening transnational multiracial hybrids, seemed to make matters even worse. Even if we accept Frank Rich's argument that Jackson's LoTR represented a call for a multilateral declaration of war - you can't win without the tree-hugging old-world "green" ents, after all, the contours of an imperial Europe remain plainly visible. Jackson's the Two Towers made matters worse with its demonic Oliphants, and turbanned haradrim brought down by Faramir and his merry men. Present in the original text, these images become somehow more pernicious, more alluring, and more powerful when rendered in the visual field.



Return of The King has its moments of Subversion - Denethor's stagnation and demise strike one as a call for new, progressive leadership which does not send the young to futile destruction, but the terms of this subversion and progress are written entirely within the matrices of imperial power and conquest. (Not to mention a masculinist construction of the nation, no matter how gratifying it is to see Eowyn and Merry chop up the Lord of the Nine.)



If there is the sort of common hero here that Evan attempts to locate in the Rohirrim, i'd argue, however predicatbly, that it lies in the hobbits - especially Sean Astin's thoroughly proletarian Sam. Nevertheless this is a heroism which again performs and makes visible the logics of war and empire, and we might ask what is subtracted from Tolkien's narrative by Jackson's excision of "The Scouring of The Shire" from his narrative.



EDIT: See also Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh's discussion of Blake's Orc in the final chapter of The Many-Headed Hydra for why we need to further problematize the Tolkien-Jackson representation of barbarism and difference.

"It's funny 'cause its true:"

(From The Onion - ) U.S. To Fight Terror With Terror

Elliott Abrams, Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director For Near East and North African Affairs, said that the Bush Administration acknowledged the ethical inconsistencies of its opposing-terrorism-through-terrorism stance, but doesn't really care.



"Look, any eighth-grader knows that the line between good and evil is blurry," Abrams said. "Our concern is the safety of the American people. An eye for an eye: Let's see if that plan works."



Abrams refused to provide clues about the time and method of attack, other than to allude to an "election-year surprise."



"Just wait and you'll see," Abrams said. "Martin Luther King said, 'Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars.' Well, enemies of democracy and freedom around the world are going to find out just how right he was. They'll see just how dark it can get."



Experts from the Mukhabarat el-Aama Egyptian intelligence service have deemed the message authentic.



"There is no doubt who the men on the tape are," spokesman Sulieman Assad said. "Cheney can clearly be recognized from previous tapes, albeit a bit aged, and John Ashcroft is wearing his iconic stern, fanatical expression. I would recommend that the Arab world raise its security alert level to 'severe,' but apparently, it has already been that way for some time."

Hehe. Someone (not me) stole a $3,000 wooden map from the wall in the entry-gate to Yale's Saybrook College. This seems both indicative of the ridiculous notions of ownership and entitlement Yale inscribes upon its students, as well as the wealth and power of the institution itself for having a fucking $3000 WOODEN MAP in the first place. I mean, i'm sure some art major would have been happy to do it for free. $3000 would fund someone's summer research, pay my rent for seven months, or fund the efforts of a search committee to replace President Levin, who is clearly way too busy trying to exonerate George W(ar Criminal) Bush of any wrongdoing to effectively lead a university in dire need of change. The theft of this map also leads me to question the university's role production of this nostalgia (albeit gone slightly amok) which led to the aforementioned pilfering of the map in question. Why do we feel the need to possess these mementos of our inculcation with the values and customs of and initiation into the ranks of the global managerial elite (well, except for me, -- I'm an unemployed schmuck moving in with his parents at age 23 (or 22 and 11/12, but what's the difference?) How must this act, and the desire from a tangible object of collegiate nostalgia which presumably spawned it, be read in the context of Yale's significations of privilege, empire, and maturity or lack thereof?



That's enough for now.

Since there was no "Middle Eastern" involvement in the 1995 Oklahoma City Federal Building bombing, someone had to go and invent one.



charming.

Via Josh, we learn that 23,000 Home Healthcare workers in NY 1199SEIU (About 9% of the huge local) are facing a June 7 strike date and that they have a website, Invisible No More, which everyone reading this should check out if you haven't already.

Interesting article in today's NYT about Gregory Rabassa, translator extraordinaire, which quotes Benjamin:

Walter Benjamin, the German literary critic, once wrote, "No translation would be possible if in its ultimate essence it strove for likeness to the original."

Rabassa's translation of The Autumn of The Patriarch is next on my reading list after I finish Gender Trouble, and i remember being impressed with his tranlations of Cien anos de soledad and the various Marquez short stories I read in high school.

Well, I've graduated from college into unemployment...



But at least o git the Return of the King DVD. Who needs a career when you have the defenders of the west killing demonic elephants and their orientalized barbarian terrorist riders? I'm going to have to set aside some packing time to revel in the imperial fantasies of the salvation of the west against the "Dark Lord" of the east and the "pirates" of the South.



Hey, maybe that's a dissetation topic.



No, probably not.

Workers Win at SBC

After a four day strike, the CWA and SBC have reached a tentative agreement with what union reps are describing as good job security language and health care language.

``This agreement helps ensure that American workers and their communities benefit from the promise of new information technology jobs,'' CWA President Morton Bahr said in a statement, adding that the pact provides opportunity for members as they move from traditional telecom work to the new technologies of the industry.

Yesterday's New Haven Register Headline: Yale Graduation Takes Over City.



Today, Evan Cobb describes a New Haven under state surveillance, its traffic lanes completely colonized by Yale's rituals of self aggrandization and exclusion (and familial celebrations of accomplishment, with which i don't particularly want to tangle here,) so right now, i'm in hiding in my parents' apartment in NYC. I missed class day, but Josh's away message suggests that Burns wasn't bad - at least compared to Thomas "IHeart Empire" Friedman. I'm pretty sure i would have reacted less favorably than Josh, had i been there, but i wasn't, so it doesn't matter. "Pimp My Ride" is the best show ever.



New Job Prospect: Rick Springfield karaoke artist.

Automato, the eponymous debut LP by the six piece instrumental hip hop band of the same name, is a mature, textured work nearly four years in the making. Gone are the simple repeating riffs of the early 6DF work - though "How to Read a Person Like a Book," is mostly unchanged - but other 6DF songs - the renamed and radically reworked "The Single" and "Gold of Desert Kings" benefit enormously from the complexity and vision of the recrafting they receive here. The songs are a combination of the best of the band's older incarnation (though one misses conversations in subway stations, we get the homeless acapella on the 1 and 9 train, so it's all good) and some startling new tracks - the bouncy guitar of "focus," acoustic driven "hollywood and vine," and "The Let Go," Jesse Levine's restrained, stolid meditation on death and loss. While i waver back and forth between skepticism over and appreciation for the clear dancepunk influence on "Hope," the album's final song, which concludes with a four minute rapturous jam session, this is a strong debut and merits attention.

Michael Berube questions the teleological narrative of Paul Westerberg's career - but, i think, discounts the brilliance of Sorry Ma and Hootenanny. If you've been reading this blog muc, or listening to me babble in person, you have probably figured out that i've been obsessed with The Replacements for a while now, so i felt obligated to link to Berube's post even if i think that many who call the band "The Mats," including a comment poster on Berube's site, might argue against his elision of the band's early work.

Jane Dark provocatively quotes Negri and Hardt's upcoming Multitude on biopower, individualized violence, and torture:

Biopower wields not just the power of mass destruction of life (such as that threatened by nuclear weapons) but also individualized violence. When individualized in its extreme form, biopower becomes torture....Torture is today becoming and ever more generalized technique of control, and at the same time is becoming increasingly banalized....Torture is one central point of contact between police action and war; the torture techniques used in the name of police prevention take on all the characteristics of military action. This is another face of the state of exception and the tendency for political power to free itself from the rule of law.

SBC ON STRIKE

Join the fight at FairnessAtSBC.com

Coming Soon

An in-depth review of Automato

Why I'm boycotting my own graduation

Leaving New Haven

Robert Lovato takes on Samuel Huntington, two Bronxes, white fear, and "civilization."

We must meditate about and lay siege upon the workings of white fear as if we are indeed the very barbarians Huntington invokes. We must now take our place alongside African Americans and countless barbarian others at the front of the long march to move this country, this world beyond the calcified history and fossilized notions of "civilization" and "assimilation" lurking behind the gated white walls of the Bronx Historical Society and Samuel Huntington's mind.

I just found out that Gloria Anzaldua died last week. This makes me very sad. I'm shocked that the so-called "paper of record" compeletely failed to report this, and I draw readers' attentions to this obituary from the Santa Cruz Sentinel and this moving online altar at which people have posted memories and emotions about Anzaldua's life and work.

SBC to strike after midnight:

Gloating over a corpse?



Jeez.

"Senior Week"

This admixture of cheap drinks and

cheap nostalgia

isn't doing it for me,

and all too often i'm finding myself alone in bookstores in gentrified shells of commodity fetishism in distribution centers for the sugar caffeine industrial complex in darkend rooms with images of empire flickering in lightning before my eyes in bathtubs which stink of failure

dreading another lost year, because i've had so many here.

I remember dreading what this place would do to me and yearning for escape and now i know that there is none and that Yale is done with me.

Your email schedules exclamation points and reminders exclude me from the collectivity they imagine. I am going home to New York not to gentrify but to mourn and lock myself in patterns of seclusion and resentment and i don't think i'm ever going to find a job and i just want out and i'm playing back the chaos of this morning and my stupid shit accumulated over the last year and i just want it to fucking end, but it doesn't work like that. I will not enjoy the martini bar glitz and wild rides along amsterdam in chelsea in what you have turned the east village into towards which you lean with anticipation because my city will forever be torn between an upper west side which no longer exists (if it ever did) and a trail of subterranean memories emerging at Dyckman and soaring out to Two hundred and forty-sixth's street's grassy hills and fallen trees coated in poison oak. Look out Rolly.

I'd conclude the mental masturbation here but we've all been doing it for four years so why stop now and i think i learned today staring into the faces of angry principals testosterone crazed coaches and disappointed students that i have no fucking idea how to organize and i now understand alcohol and i'm stressed as fuck.

i want my life back i want my life back hey hey hey right now but it ain't gonna happen and i'm getting out of thsi fucking computer lab.

redacted until i publish my dissertation

(Deleted two posts - one on the "Kerry Nader summit," because this blog ain't really about electoral politics, and one on the YDN article about the fliers which identify the four men who broke into Kat Lo's room last year, because i've caused enough controversy today, i think.



Anybody else find the article in this week's (abyssmal as always) PLAY on ONHSA truly disgusting? Not a speck of criticism in thsi hagiographic piece of junk. Do these not-quite-ready-for the mediocrity that is the Register reporters even do any research?



At least they did us one favor: no Darth Vader in the publicity photo of smiling propaganda ministers.

Quick links:



Richard Goldstein on Abu Ghraib and the limits of the "fit to be seen."



Over 100,000 SBC workers will strike for four days. Will this be enough?



The California State Senate vs. The California Correctional Peace Officers Association.



I want to blog something about the huge numbers of civilian deaths we've seen over the last few days in Rafah and in Western Iraq. The latter case, as you may have read, may or may not - depending on whether you believe the US Armed Forces over Al-Arabiya TV, have occurred in the context of a wedding.

But Dubai-based Al Arabiya television, quoting eyewitnesses, said the raid on the village of Makr al-Deeb before dawn had targeted people celebrating a wedding and had killed at least 41 civilians.



"We received about 40 martyrs today, mainly women and children below the age of 12," Hamdy al-Lousy, the director of Qaim hospital, told Al Arabiya. "We also have 11 people wounded, most of them in critical condition."



Arabiya showed pictures of several shrouded bodies lined up on a dirt road. Men were shown digging graves and lowering bodies, one of a child, into the pits while relatives wept.



"The U.S. planes dropped more than 100 bombs on us," an unidentified man who said he was from the village said on Al Arabiya. "They hit two homes where the wedding was being held and then they levelled the whole village. No bullets were fired by us, nothing was happening," he added.

In Rafah, IDF forces opoened fire on a group of protesting refugees and killed nine people a day after another IDF raid which killed nineteen.



This shit has to stop.

Elvin Jones

9/9/1927-5/18/2004

This is unbelievable. That the republicans woudl knowingly inflict this kind of genocide by STD is truly mind blowing.

Somebody found this site by searching for "yiddishe naked women." The choice of words perplexes and bemuses me.



Oh yeah: Gay Marriage. Gay marriage? Gay Marriage! Gay Marriage.

Update: having now listened to the automato tracks i'm struck by how much more complex their sound has become. Jesse's rhymes have also become much more intricate and powerful. It's good stuff. They're playing shows with MF DOOM.

Wobbling Starbucks (via email-circulated press release):

New York, NY- Starbucks workers here have organized a union with the

Industrial Workers of the World IU/660 and have submitted union cards today to the

NLRB for a certification election. The workers are poised to become the first

Starbucks Baristas union certified in the country. Starbucks Baristas at the 36th

and Madison location in Midtown Manhattan have come together in an effort to

raise themselves out of poverty as well as to achieve respect and dignity on

the job. The workers are calling on Starbucks to obey the law as the election

approaches.



Behind the green aprons and smiles are individuals living in serious

poverty, said Daniel Gross, a worker at the store. Baristas are the cornerstone of

a Starbucks coffee shop, we just deserve better. Starbucks cashes in on a

community friendly image but it certainly doesn't extend to their workers or

coffee farmers. That's why we went Union.



Starbucks is a $15 billion company with over 7,500 locations around the

world, but workers have most emphatically not shared in their success. In New York

City with one of the highest costs of living in the world, Starbucks workers

start at $7.75 an hour and eventually receive raises amounting to merely a few

cents. Starbucks has also developed a scheme whereby all Baristas work on a

part-time basis and are not guaranteed any amount of hours per week thus making

it exceedingly difficult for workers to budget for necessities like rent,

utilities, and food.



I come to work and I work hard, said Maureen Medianero, 23, who has worked

at Starbucks for almost 2 years. ^ÓBut I^Òm still hanging on by a shoe string

not knowing if I can make ends meet to support my daughter. It's frightening.

Six Dimension Formula, a band whose original lineup involved four kids from my high school and two kids from another high school (now its three from my high school, the same two from the other high school, and one person i don't know) have changed their name to automato and released an album (this CMJ website offers a set of audio files which i haven't been able to listen to yet, but which includes some version of the raucous 6DF song "Soul Music" (though by August of 2000, performed versions of the song sounded totally different from (and much more impressive than) the somewhat campy track on their demo - which they debuted when they opened up for Shamus McNasty in the fall of 1998. I'm looking forward to hearing their CD, which has some pretty nifty cover art.. They're on the same label as The Coup, which si kind of incredible (I guess 75 Ark collapsed) and are on tour with RJD2, who is reviewed on pitchfork today.



In other news, i bumped into Mattnick today for the first time in more or less all of senior year. Is an Austin and The Technicolor Pipefuckers reunion in the works? Probably not. Still, it was good to see him.



Update: Oh, and one more thing. I got a (barely) passing grade in Natty Haz. This means i graduate. Now, to paraphrase Eric Cartman, "Who wants to hire me. I said who wants to fucking hire me?"

Kerry, Boredom, and Revolution

Beth at Seditious Libel asks why the Democrats are always seen as the boring party. I think there are two reasons for this:

1.The parafascism of Bush and the neoconservatives may not phrase itself openly as a revolutionary ideology - although it could easily be argued that the project of remaking the middle east (and the occasionally articulated goal (by some of the more fringe elements of the right) of war on islam constitute just such an ideology, nevertheless phrases, in Huntingtonian fashion - and Samuel Huntington is quite fashionable these days, its project in terms of a cataclysmic and categorical threat to the -imagined or real- grandeur and power of the West/North and its legacy from the barbaric hordes of the antimodern periphery. Fascism though this may be, it's exciting - much like JRR Tolkien's Lord of The Rings (which, after all, operates on many of the same premises, is exciting.

2.The liberalism of Kerry and his ilk articulates itself as a progressive vision - and indeed Kerry is certainly more Progressive (whatever this means) than Bush or (if only barely) Lynn Cheney's pal Joe Lieberman. Yet liberalism (and Kerry's is a liberalism of the neo variety) has always been about a dim teleology, a progress towards a distant realization of the nation sometime in the far future while maintaining a very very slowly shifting status quo. This lacks the dynamism and ferocity of the neoconservative dream.

We call Bush and his ilk the reactionaries, but this is only partially true, and obscures the extent to which theirs is a project which seeks to melt all that is solid into blood and forge a new old world from the blasted husk of the present.

I gave up on Naples night and i give up on this place and I'll hang around for the next few days vbecause i've made commitments (leafletting tomorrow, teaching wednesday, dinner on the 26th with my UMOJA students,) but for the most part i can't take Yale anymore (today's parade, when the New Haven community took over Elm street for a few brief moments being an ephemeral exception, though it outlasted the weird incident in which a man shoved his finger into my ofrehead and drew blood - and i have not made good on my commitments to craft an "eascape plan" as it were, and i just want to pack up and get out. (Even though part of me would be perfectly happy to come back fro grad school or to organize or something.)



Which would probably mean mom and dad's apartment. Which i'm not sure i can take right now - but with no job, i'm not going anywhere else, obviously.



Fuck. Going to Naples alone reminded me of all those thursday nights three years ago and made me feel a profound solitude. Or maybe it wasn't so profound really. Fuck it. I'm going to go home, jump in the bathtub, and read something escapist or teleological.

Feeling shiftless, bored, and lonely. Wishing i'd left New Haven after the CCNE conference (glad that we found josh though.) Now that i'm done i don't know what to do with myself and i guess i'm procrastinating a liottle on the whole job front. I re-met some people today (at several different moments) who i'm glad i talked to again, so that was good. And the conference itself (barring the keynote speaker's off message didactic colonialsm of the social space of african american youth movements and the white guy in our workshop who wouldn't stop lecturing my mostly black and mostly female fellow workshop participants on issues barely related to what we had been discussing and who seems to have not noticed the pre4sence of a facilitator or said facilitator's desire to hear other voices) was great.



I'm really tired, and i went to sleep late last night after the atrocious movie and woke up early this morning for the conference. (DO NOT SEE TROY. IT IS FUCKING ABYSSMAL. TIMEO CRAPPY MOVIES CENTERED AROUND RAPE FANTASIES ET BRAD PITT et ORLANDO BLOOM FERENTES. And just to drop a little more knowledge on your ass:,

mênin aeide thea Pêlêïadeô* Achilêos

oulomenên*, hê muri' Achaiois alge' ethêke,

pollas d' iphthimous psuchas Aïdi* proïapsen

hêrôôn, autous de helôria teuche kunessin

oiônoisi te pasi*+, Dios d' eteleieto boulê,

ex hou* dê ta prôta diastêtên erisante

Atreïdês te anax andrôn kai dios Achilleus.)

and while i'm reliving my vanished former life as a classics scholar, why not complete the worst movie ever made for ridiculous amounts of money's font of distorted inspiration with some lines from P. Virgilius Maro's Aeneid (and a shout out to Barbara Ellis):

Facilis descensus Averno:

Noctes atque dies patet atri ianua Ditis;

Sed revocare gradum superasque evadere ad auras,

Hoc opus, hic labor est.

and i with that, i revoco my grada placidasque ad auras casae meae.

Via Josh:



Seymour Hersh drops a bombshell:

Rumsfeld reacted in his usual direct fashion: he authorized the establishment of a highly secret program that was given blanket advance approval to kill or capture and, if possible, interrogate “high value” targets in the Bush Administration’s war on terror. A special-access program, or sap—subject to the Defense Department’s most stringent level of security—was set up, with an office in a secure area of the Pentagon. The program would recruit operatives and acquire the necessary equipment, including aircraft, and would keep its activities under wraps. America’s most successful intelligence operations during the Cold War had been saps, including the Navy’s submarine penetration of underwater cables used by the Soviet high command and construction of the Air Force’s stealth bomber. All the so-called “black” programs had one element in common: the Secretary of Defense, or his deputy, had to conclude that the normal military classification restraints did not provide enough security.



“Rumsfeld’s goal was to get a capability in place to take on a high-value target—a standup group to hit quickly,” a former high-level intelligence official told me. “He got all the agencies together—the C.I.A. and the N.S.A.—to get pre-approval in place. Just say the code word and go.” The operation had across-the-board approval from Rumsfeld and from Condoleezza Rice, the national-security adviser. President Bush was informed of the existence of the program, the former intelligence official said.

Torture is certainly nothing new for the United States, either in its CIA training manuals or SOA classrooms or its own prisons and police stations. Nor has torture in the context of America's occupation of Iraq been confined or limited to inside the walls of Abu Ghraib. Nevertheless, the images which may have jost lost bush the election - god willing that some good might come of such images - necessitate careful analyses whose emergence we're only beginning to see.

Cheney Sings Wal-Mart's praises



taht's all for the moment, but i promise more later.

Phoebe rocks the Courant:

I was surprised to see Deputy Provost Andrew Hamilton's statement in
The Courant that "Yale does not appoint its ladder faculty based on
student demands."

Why don't we have a say about who teaches us?

Last semester, a group of undergraduates at Yale met with Nina
Glickson, the assistant to President Richard Levin. She assured us that
the Yale administration was doing everything in its power to promote
diversity among the faculty. In a meeting last week, Deputy Provost
Hamilton told me that Yale is not renewing the contract of Professor
Allen - one of the few black women professors in the sciences at Yale.

Dr. Allen is a beloved mentor and one of the best teachers in the
chemistry department. Deputy Provost Hamilton and the Yale
administration should listen to students and give Professor Allen her
job back.

Phoebe R. Rounds

And Mary Reynolds follows suit:

Deputy Provost Andy Hamilton argues that Yale does not respond to
student demands. Yet, history shows that Yale can listen to its
students. In the 1960s, the newly formed Black Student Alliance at Yale
demanded an African American studies program.

Despite opposition, BSAY held a conference, submitted a petition to
Yale's president and forged a community capable of undertaking the
tremendous task of educating the administration, faculty and other
students.

Created in 1969, Yale's African American Studies Program now ranks
among the best in the United States. These students helped pry open
Yale's doors, allowing women and people of color to enter, but for many
of Yale's faculty these doors continue to revolve and spit them out
after years of service.

Last week, dozens of Professor Connie Allen's former students submitted
letters to President Richard Levin praising her teaching and
mentorship. In April, 300 graduate students filed a formal grievance
with the administration to request that Yale fulfill its stated
commitment to diversity.

In 30 years, will we look back and see the inauguration of a new
generation of women scientists and scholars of color, or will we see
Yale's missed opportunity to provide the best teaching and mentorship
for all students?

Mary R. Reynolds
New Haven

Both Phoebe and Mary have "R"s as both middle and final initials. Coincidence? Probably. Yesterday a graduate student, myself, and one of Dr. Allen's former students requested a meeting with President Levin to discuss Dr. Allen next week and notified Levin's receptionist that we'd return if we didn't hear back by Monday.

Today I joined a caravan of Gesistas and went down to the upper west side (represent!) joining the picket lines of Columbia University's striking graduate students, GSEU-UAW, who have been on strike for four weeks. The strike is going strong, and I'm glad I was able to head down and stand up for my neighborhood and scream for justice "in our classrooms and on our streets." The GSEUistas had a huge rat in front of the Broadway gate, and a very big picket line stretching almost all the way from the gate down to the Columbia bookstore. They had some serious solidarity. Besides 20 Gesistas, there were folks there from a bunch of NYC unions (including GSOC-UAW from NYU) and GET-UP. What they didn't have were chants - but it's ok - Maris brought the trumpet, and GSEU's drum squad were fast learners. Plus, I suspect this was less a function of them not having chants than of them being exhausted after striking for a month. And none of us ever came up with anything as good as "DON'T FUCK WITH MY TA."

At any rate, it's pretty clear that the GSEU folks have an extraordinary amount of solidarity behind them, (even nutty spartacists in sunglasses,)and this is a very good thing. GSEU is going to win. GET-UP is going to win. And GESO, who have been organizing longer than both combined, and who have faced incredible persecution and opposition and survived and come out stronger than ever (just check out the new mcplunk designed t-shirts (i want one so bad,) are going to win.

Today's banner headline in the New Haven Register: "Rumsfeld Goes To Iraqi Prison." We wish.

It's so refreshing to not have hundreds of pages of writing hanging over my head after a smester's end, to be able to curl up with a good book, happily await the DVD release of "Return of The King," post comments on other people's websites, and not have to freak out when someone proposes two times for a possible meeting - because i have nothing else to do, and therefore can make any time i want to. Sure, within a few hours the fact that i don't have a job or any summer plans will surely set in, but for now, i'm going to wallow in some well-earned inertia. Although I'm not particularly convinced that I earned anything. Which is one ofthe many reason's i'm skipping commencement. Along with the fact that Levin's a fascist, Klansmen wear robes, (and despite what Rumpus may say about me, i'm a little to yiddishe to be a klansman. Plus there's he whole antiracist anarchist thingy) and i hate being the center of attention and i don't like Ken Burns' work all that much and i don't need Yale to tell me what I've accomplished in my life over the last four years because most of it has been in opposition to the vision of the university that commencement will try to celebrate. Forgive the rambling. I only sept three hours last night. I'll shut up now.

Assuming that I didn't fail my Natural Hazards final and will thus recieve a passing grade in the class, then as of 10:48 PM last night, i am finished with college. Holy shit.



Now i really really really need a job. Or a Zig a Zag-ah. You decide.

1199 To Strike Stamford Health Systems

Stamford Health System employees are threatening a three-day strike but will stay on the job if the new chairman of the board meets them at the bargaining table.



Members of New England Health Care Employees Union, District 1199, are prepared to walk off the job May 26.



Sixty-five of the union members are on Stamford Hospital's dietary staff and 120 are certified nursing assistants, licensed practical nurses, physical therapy aides, dietary workers and housekeeping employees at the Tandet Center nursing home.



The workers, who have been involved in the labor dispute for nearly two years, picketed outside Stamford Health System Chairman Michael Herling's Landmark Square office yesterday afternoon. They chanted, "One, two, three, four, no one should be working poor," and waved union flags.

***

The workers say salaries are not the sticking point: They don't want to lose health, retirement and vacation benefits.



"It's more our benefits than anything," said Richard Romano, 48, who has worked in the hospital's kitchen for 11 years. "They want to take away the sick days and vacation days we've earned."



Romano, who gets four weeks of vacation, 12 sick days and 10 paid holidays a year under the old contract, said he stands to lose seven paid days off under the administration's proposal to combine sick days, personal days and vacation days into one category called "paid time off."



Union members also are worried about rising costs of health insurance. Hospital dietary employees are on a union-sponsored plan that requires no weekly contribution, although there is a deductible of up to $1,000 a year and co-payments for office visits.



Stamford Health System is proposing a choice of plans under which the costs vary depending on the type of coverage, Orstad said.



Union officials say the hospital wants members to pay about $60 a week for health insurance, which they can't afford.



On average, members earn $12.81 an hour.



Sandy Williams of Stamford says she makes just more than $14 an hour after 35 years as a diet technician, collecting meal orders from patients and delivering their food.



"My job is considered one of the highest paying jobs (in the union), can you believe that?" she said.



Workers said they don't want to strike but are prepared to to hold onto their benefits.



"They are trying to take all of our benefits away and we've worked too hard," said Mae Anderson of Stamford, a hospital employee of 34 years. "We've been in this union since 1974. Everything we've gained they are trying to take back and it's not right."

Two perspectives on Lynndie England and women at Abu Ghraib from this week's village voice:



Richard Goldstein

Say what you will about sexism in this coverage. It's definitely true. But there's another reason why England's face is so ubiquitous in the press. Many acts depicted in those awful photos resonate with certain erotic fantasies. To admit that images of forced sodomy and pyramids of naked men are arousing is to understand why guards can do such things when ordered to, and then smile for the cameras. But because these fantasies clash with acceptable sexuality, they produce revulsion. The media show just enough flesh to rivet our attention, while blurring the holes in the prisoners' rectums as a signal of what we need to repress.



But offer an image of a woman grinning at the humiliation of men and you allay any homosexual anxiety while tapping into the permissible kitten-with-a-whip fantasy. You can blame her for being unnatural even as you project yourself into her gaze. By fostering this reverie, the press helps to transform a horrible story into a source of pleasure. That's where Lynndie England comes in. She's not just the face of Torturegate; she's the dominatrix of the American dream.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Anti-Amazons are now emboldened by the conspicuous presence of women in the Abu Ghraib scandal. "While some advocates of women in the military have argued that women's presence would improve behavior, in fact there is much evidence to suggest it has had the opposite effect," conservative columnist Linda Chavez wrote last Thursday. "For years now, the military has ignored substantial evidence that the new sex-integrated military interferes with unit cohesion and results in less discipline."



But the abuse at Abu Ghraib raises more subtle questions about what happens when gender, violence, and the military collide. Our basic assumptions are upended. Were the prisoners victims of sexual assault? If the prisoners had been women, wouldn't the act of piling them, naked, into grotesque pyramids be considered a kind of gang rape? Are we saying that female guards, like England and specialists Sabrina D. Harman and Megan Ambuhl—who face charges ranging from dereliction of duty to indecent acts—can't commit rape? Should we be shocked that female soldiers were involved in the atrocities? If we are, what does that say about what we think of women?

Nothing profound to post right now - still writing my paper, but i wanted to call folks' attention to this cool little story i snagged via Labourstart

Well, I'm writing my last-ever paper of college (assuming I didn't fail anything.) The paper is on Abdelrahman Munif's The Trench, and the spatial imagination of oil imperialism. (I'm six pages into the paper and fairly excited about it. Everyone should read the incredible first book in the series as well, which is fucking amazing.) The Undergraduate Organizing Committee threw a last minute get together for those of us who are departing tonight. (Which is when it hit me that I'm not going to see a lot of folks for a very long time, which is kind of scary/intense.) But it was great to see everyone, (especially Schnabels!) meet Helena's dad (wow), and my stuffed bear and can of playdoh rule. I decided that my life at the moment is kind of like a cross between "Bastards of Young" and the middle part of "You Never Give Me Your Money," but then that seemed ridiculously pretentious, so I just told myself to shut up and finish my damn paper.



Update: So i'm writing this paper in a computer cluster, and all of the sudden, hear a loud recording of a woman moaning and shouting in ectsasy. I turn around and the guy behind me tries to pass it off as "spam gets more creative every day." Yeah right. You were watching porn! In the middle of a computer cluster! Admit it! And then turn the damn volume down so I can write my fucking paper!

HIGH TAXES DO NOT SOCIAL DEMOCRACY MAKE

I share Jacob's skepticism about this argument, for an entirely different reason. We don't need to look as far as the US to talk about the destruction of the social democratic welfare state. Granted, the welfare state was always a racist and exclusionary machine, but Australia's policy of dumping undocumented immigrants and refugees in internment camps in Nauru looks more like the militarized borders of Pat Buchanan's America, Joerg Haider's Austria, or John Ashcroft's Guantanamo Bay. While I'd hardly call myself a social democrat in any sense - I'm firmly aligned with the extraparliamentary direct action crowd - i don't really think this is what Eduoard Bernstein had in mind, and it strikes me that if anything, this is democracy of the herrenvolk sort.

Kinder, Gentler My Ass

This Hartford Courant Editorial seems to suggest that thanks to last year's frantic "reforms," everything's peachy keen at Yale-New Haven Hospital nowadays, or at least improving. Unfortunately, this isn't the case. The free care application process remains arcane and inaccessible. The curtailing of lien tactics, which came about because of massive popular pressure on the hospital, does not mean that the hospital can now continue to shirk its responsibility to provide patients with affordable care uncompromised by CEO Joseph Zaccagnino et al's corporate profiteering, which continues to this day. And 1800 hospital workers still do not have the right to a voice on the job free from intimidation. Until the hospital agrees to enter a real dialogue with the community and its workers, pronouncements of the hospital's "Kinder, Gentler" nature are not only premature, but ridiculous and wholly inaccurate.

PRETTY DISGUSTING

And it begs the question of what Yale did to get Bush and Rodham Clinton to speak in 2001. (I'd link to the YDN, but, what do you know, the site is down. Big surprise -- they haven't had a weekend without a site outage since Jia Lynn ruled the editorial page.)

The Chicago Maroon reports on the Columbia GSEU Strike. A University of Chiocago administrator dismisses the possibility of a union drive at Chicago, but at least one students is voicing a difference of opinion from Dean Steven Klass's assertion that Chicago need have nothing to worry about:

“I think that forming a union may help increase awareness of the concerns of the graduate student community.” Pinawin said. “If we were to approach the university administration as a union we might be more successful in getting the reforms that we would like passed, such as university-subsidized health care.”

Ack! What the hell is going on with Blogger? This is really confusing!



Anyway, some more thoughts on the collapse of the NYC Ska Scebe from someone who left way to early to really justify voicing them:



Something that always frustrated me was the elitist ignorance towards other musics. I got this sense from lots of self-described ska kids that you couldn't listen to anything else. Had to be jamaican or jamaican influenced. This was really ridiculous, since hip hop wouldn't exist without the sounds systems pioneered by people like Duke Reid and the deejaying techniques - and particularly the whole idea behind Dub and Dub Poetry of people like U-Roy, I-Roy, Big Youth, Linton Kwesi Johnson et al. The electronic music many of us thought ska was an alternative to (Noah Wildman certainly carried on about this rather frequently) owed a great deal to a lot of people who cut their chops on Clue J and the Blues Blasters records or versions of Tommy McCook and the Supersonics 45s. Its a shame that those of us who got into ska in the mid 1990s turned off other sounds, because we missed some great music - from Pavement to Outkast to The Coup to Yo La Tengo to Odelay AND Mutations and a bunch of other albums which were ultimately much, much better than about 98% of any ska produced between 1994 and 1998. Maybe the US ska scene could have actually evolved into something creative and sustainable (where the adjusters and skinnerbox were arguably trying to take it -- pretty much anything vic rice had his hands on from '98 on was the most important ska music being made in the US at least at that point) had bands and fans listened to other stuff instead of dismissing it out of hand if it didn't involve some schmuck doing a walt jabsco impression on the front cover, instead of the incestuous, bloated, self-cannibalizing exploitative dead husk of a movement which it had inarguably become by the time vultures like the Cherry Poppin Daddies smelled the change on the winds and began moving on to greener pastures. I used to blame it all on California. In particular, i used to blame it all on Orange County and L.A. Jump With Joey were wildly overrated, Hepcat was overhyped if still a pretty damn good band, but for me the real offenders were bands like well, Cousin Oliver, obviously, but also The Edge, the O.C. Supertones, that other weird christian band - Five Iron Frenzy, i think, and god knows how many others. I don't anymore. The NYC, DC, and Boston scenes had enough problems of their own, and i think this elitism and insularity was a genre-killer.

So i disagree with many of the contentions Adam Liebling makes in his tongue in cheek account of the downfall of the american ska scene.



1. The supporting of crappy local bands

As Cervantes once said, greed is the root of all evil. And greed in the ska scene took two forms: kids who couldn't get enough of the ska, and young crappy bands who were happy to oblige. The former couldn't be happy with the Sublimes and Leftover Cracks of the world who were already producing excellent ska, so they generated a demand for more. Bands popped up to fill that demand and line their pockets… only problem was that they sucked. Yet ska kids continued to support them in their greedy hunger, and this glut continued until 99% of ska sucked. That much concentrated suckage was one of the largest contributions to the downfall of the music.



Okay, Yeah Cousin Oliver were the worst thing to happen to Music since Collective Soul, but the problem wasn't really the glut as much as it was the commodification and exploitation of a nearly defunct style of jamaican popular music by American labels, major and minor. I include moon in this. Some of the stuff they put out was total garbage.



3. Preferring swing and rockabilly over ska

And many ska fans left because they became seduced by the swing and rockabilly revival movements. Instead of keeping one foot planted in the ska scene, they all ran full steam into a new scene, burning bridges behind them. And from what I hear, those wagon jumpers are now mainly listening to emo and Liz Phair.



Personally, i went through a phase where all i was listening to was Charles Mingus and Miles Davis. but my involvement and vantage point were somewhat different than others, cause i actually volunteered to stand behind a counter and sell crap like Cousin Oliver to people without getting paid. But there was a long time after i quit to go do homework (and go on a date with someone 8 hours of work on saturday really eats up your weekend when you structure your evening around Xena: Warrior Princess) - well, really after that october when everyone either got fired or quit in disgust, when i could barely listen to anything with a syncopated upbeat without hurling. Petty justifications aside, i think the mass exodus of folks from the ska scene had a lot to do with burnout - and the collapse of just about every band i can think of seems to support this hypothesis.



5. The splintering of ska

One day, ska is Less Then Jake, Bosstones, and No Doubt (though some would argue that last one - but their return to ska on their latest "Rock Steady" should remove any "doubts!") The next day, you have ska-funk, ska-jazz, ska-this, ska-that. Now, I'm not saying that the evolution of music is bad, but I don't believe the scene was mature enough to handle it. Immediately, bickering sprung up over which type of ska was better. Coastal wars were the norm. Ska-jazz especially turned off a lot of fans: Long jams, soloing, and lengthy song durations sapped the energy and fun danceability from ska. It soon wasn't rare to see upwards of 8 musicians on stage, each taking a turn to bore the hell out of you



Disagree: this was only a problem when the bands sucked - which many of them did. Tons of so-called trad-ska bands were pretentious, mediocre musicians who disguised a lack of talent or vision with claims to authenticity and made boring, boring music which really did create kind of a glut, i guess. Still, there were as many if not more execrable third wavey pop-ska bands and ska-punk bands. Particularly from Orange County CA, Long Island and New Jersey.



6. Stealing music

A friend of mine owns a computer. One of the things he does on it is download ska music - without paying for it. I asked him why, and he replied: "I don't have the money, and I can just get the songs on the Internet." Is it any wonder that bands couldn't afford to survive, especially with upwards of eight musicians in their band?



enh. By the time i figured out how to download MP3s, everyone knew about the Noah Wildman stuff and Moon was basically on the verge of collapse anyway, and the rest of the US ska scene was in the same boat. So i don't buy this. (No pun intended.)



7. Negative behaviors

Ska fans, otherwise respectable-looking in suits and sweaters, decided to call themselves "rudeboys" and act rude to people. This turned off many, including, I'm sure, radio stations and MTV.



hehe.



8. Not crossing over into rap

While taking on many permutations, ska didn't follow metal's lead into rap (the only thing that saved metal, incidentally). Racism or just plain stupidity?



while i realize the not-quite serious nature of these questions, i just wanted to point out Critical Mass's cover of Eric B. and Rakim's "Paid in Full." Also, there was that Sugar Ray song.



10. Warped sense of quality

As previously mentioned, ska fans were rabid over crappy, local bands. But how did they feel toward the bigger, touring bands? They resented them. A backlash against the more popular ska bands, like Smashmouth and No Doubt, was fueled by ska fans' immaturity. Not wanting to share their music, and having the local bands to supply what they need, the bigger bands who were shouldering the scene fell under the weight of negative attitudes. And like Ayn Rand's Atlantis Shrugged, many of the bigger bands gave up the ska and went on to play pop music - where they could be appreciated.



Smashmouth always sucked. I think Adam's right about No Doubt though, who were pegged as sellouts when i think they were really just trying to write great pop songs. I think people were frustrated because Less Than Jake were blowing up and corporate radio was having a loud orgasm over an ahistoricized reified something called "ska" while ignoring not only the pretty well-established two tone movement in the 70s and 80s and the jamaican stuff before that. But i think indie labels were just as guilty, if nopt moreso, of reifying and marketing brand ska. It's "Atlas Shrugged," btw. Worst book ever.



For folks who are really interested in learning why the american ska scene imploded, take a look at this analysis by the same writer, which, when it came out, sent me into convulsive fits of laughter for several weeks. (Although i'm not certain folks who weren't involved in the ska revival as fans, musicians, groupies, etc would get some of the ridiculously esoteric satire in here. Anyway, it's still pretty funny six years later.

Coxsone's Music City was, in high school, sort of like the Mecca i never made the hajj to or something. I knew it was there. I desperately wanted to go, particularly when i was working at Moon Ska, but i didn't know my way around Brooklyn for shit and i was kind of intimidated by the prospect of actually meeting the guy who discovered bob marley and produced some of the most important music in the history of the african diaspora, so i never made the trek. Now that Coxsone's dead, i probably never will. Still, it's kind of crazy reading about the place in the NYT.

Thomas Friedman:



The Arab world, alas, has been cursed with oil. For decades, too many Arab countries have opted to drill a sand dune for economic growth rather than drilling their own people — men and women — in order to tap their energy, creativity, intellect and entrepreneurship. Arab countries barely trade with one another, and unlike Korea and Japan, rarely invent or patent anything. But rather than looking inward, assessing their development deficits, absorbing the best in modern knowledge that their money can buy and then trying to beat the West at its own game, the Arab world in too many cases has cut itself off, blamed the enduring Palestine conflict or colonialism for delaying reform, or found dignity in Pyrrhic victories like Falluja.



Well this is a new one: Arab nations are too concerned with oil revenue to westernize themselves and fund development initiatives. This is such a probelatic statement, i'm not even sure where to begin (Munif's Cities of Salt works.) Gee Thomas, american oil corporations sure seem to have benefitted a lot from this "atab" pathology of oil greed. And i'm sure that the CIA never, oh, deposed any politicians trying to nationalize Gulf oil reserves or anything like that. What? They did? Oh, but Iran isn't an Arab country, so they don't count right. Ah, i see your logic now. Right. My bad, Mr. Friedman. Sorry to challenge your essentialist Huntingtonian constructions of cultural Otherness. clearly its the arabs' fault that US oil companies helped prop up and reinstate dictatorial regimes firendly to American coproate power. Clearly it is to the culpability of the monolithic arab people that we shoudl ascribe the suppression of democratic movements and social movements in which the US government was more than complicit.



Friedman suggests that if "we keep our eyes on the ball," "we" can "still" "do right" in Iraq. Unfortunately i think its pretty clear where "our" eyes have been all along.

I know Paul Bass isn't an idiot. When it comes to Yale's power, he's written some incisive, piercing, intelligent, hard hitting no bullshit and I'm running out of adjectives reporting.



It was disappointing, then, to see him write something this insipid - as if his Peppritude's coming to the table hadn't been preceded by big protests against speciously justified layoffs or, the very weekend before Pep came to the set (sorry, Shoop joke) a federationwide action once again asking for Yale to work together with workers and forge a better way. I'm glad John Pepper came to the table. Probably a much more productive thing for him to do than skulk in the corners of Dwight hall cabinet meetings with Darth Vader. I hope he and President Levin and Bruce "I love NDB" Alexander honor a commitment to forging better relations between Yale and its workers, and I think that needs to start with rescinding C&T layoffs and reaching "some understanding about how current organizing drives will be conducted." (RAI report. Remember that?)



(edit:added link to photo of Mr. M- I mean Vader.)

From Alex Duval Smith's article on Picasso as an 'undesireable':



Anarchists were the Islamic fundamentalists of the early twentieth century. 'The police did their job. They were watched and, as is the case today, 90 per cent of suspects were innocent.' In the late 1890s, anarchists carried out several bomb attacks in France, including one on parliament, and they assassinated French president Sadi Carnot.

just lost a page of my paper because i'm a total fucking idiot.



i won't be sleeping much tonight.

YALE ADMITS: WE CAUSE STROKES!

This isn't even funny. It's just sick

Ana Munoz lays the smack down on Alexandra Robbins, Sororities, and conspiracy theories as a way of ordering and representing social relations.



In this way, Robbins is a bigger elitist than the Alpha Ros who proudly reject the pear-shaped, bottle-blond, frumpy girls she claims to defend

CLEMENT "SIR COXSONE" DODD, 1932-2004









I'll listen to some Jackie Mittoo tonight. Or maybe "Simmer Down." I urge you to do the same.

Best thing about the new Outkast video?



Kid in The Hall Kevin McDonald. I love that guy.

Whoa

I just figured out how to do headers in my actual blog text.

I hate Friends. The show's dialogue isn't funny. This is largely because it is based on supposedly acerbic observations about the mannerisms of fictional characters we're supposed to know and love. Unfortunately the characters are so one dimensional and moronic that the jokes wind up just being sad instead. The actors are all obnoxious millionaires. If I can recognize Seinfeld's new york, no matter how little it resembles The New York in which I grew up, the New York in which the cast of Friends cavort is not only unrecognizable to me, but, more to the point, is nothing like any New York. Were I in a less irate mood at the moment, I might ask and attempt to answer seriously why the sitcom in the era of must-see TV now, the media tells us, coming to a close has been able to represent the postmodern metropole only through the eyes of white professionals who live in the racialized and gentrified upscale neighborhoods of Sassen's Global cities (Fraser's Seattle, i would argue, among them). People of color in these shows are present as domestic workers (Will & Grace) or curiosities (Seinfeld) if at all, but their presences and absences are central to defining the regime of who can speak and the field of vision crucial to the genre. Alright. That's it. I hate the fucking show so much i don't even want to wrote any more about it. It just sucks. And its a total cash cow for a bunch of already very wealthy people who have no talent and ought to go back to cameos in springsteen videos except i would hurl and throw things at the TV if i saw them. Ok, ANiston was good in Office Space and tolerable in Bruce Almighty at i think i remember liking Whole Nine Yards, but come on, these people have no talent. Ok, that's it. No mas. Finito.

So i have a final tomorrow for which i have not yet studied, a twenty page paper to write, and then another final on monday for which i have not yet studied. This may mean i will not be bloggin much over the next four days. Or it may mean that i am so bored of studying that i will be bloggin way too much. I am now accepting bets as to which of these possible futures will be triumphant.

First reaction: Walter Cronkite's still alive?



Second reaction: Hey! I need a job!

Bob Mould, former lead singer of Husker Du, Sugar, and current lead singer of Bob Mould (not to mention composer of the rockin' original Daily Show Theme) has an entertaining blog.



To steal a very corny phrase from the Replacements, its "something to du."

I was looking for a job, and i haven't found a job, and Levin knows i'm miserable now.



CCL is a deathtrap

swastikas make me sick

I know i've been sitting here for so long

and made so little progress

'cept panic attack



(apologies to the Smiths and Interpol.)

Whoever found this site by searching for "The Coup" "Hip Hop" Wallerstein has to be pretty cool.

The most powerful commentary I've seen on the torture of Iraqi prisoners in US administered prsions in occupied Iraq is Ahdaf Soueif's piece in today's Guardian UK. (Thanks to Kat Lo for sending this to me.)



Souief's analysis looks at the images of torture in the context of the racialized imperial logic of Bush Doctrine neocolonial militarism. For Souief, (as for Phoebe) these images are not, as Bush testified today, aberrations - freakish perversions from America's benevolent colonial mission, but rather illustrate the "deep racism" central to the Neoconservative project of remaking Southwest Asia at gunpoint. (Again, this is also why i find Nathan Newman's clever subcontracting argument not altogether sufficient.)



The media are fearful that these images will go down badly in the Arab world because "they show Muslim men being humiliated by American women". Again the not-so-subtle reduction of the Arab world to an entity that reacts only to religious prodding. Actually the photographs have confirmed people's belief that the US and Britain are not in Iraq as an act of goodwill. They have strengthened the feeling that there is a deep racism underlying the occupiers' attitudes to Arabs, Muslims and the third world generally.



It was only a matter of time. In the past year the world has seen photos of many Iraqis stripped with their wrists tied behind their backs with plastic cord. At first we could look into their eyes and bear witness to what was happening. Then they were bagged. At no point was there an outcry.



We have grown used to seeing Arab men bound and hooded, in the occupied territories and Gaza. Israel advises the US on how to control civilians and interrogate them. Ariel Sharon has made the Israeli army's "rules of engagement" available to the US military. The world notes the similarity between the practices of the US army in Iraq and those of the Israeli army in Palestine. There is evidence that scenes like the ones now shocking the world have been common in "Facility 1391" (Israel's secret prison), and some say in other jails. We just haven't seen the photos.



It is no use for US spokesmen to talk about "rogue elements", how "contractors" are not answerable to the military and how Staff Sergeant Chip Frederick had not read the Geneva conventions before taking charge of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. This abuse is going to turn out to be widespread. Amnesty International has already said it is systematic.



The acts in the photos being flashed across the networks would not have taken place but for the profound racism that infects the American and British establishments. At squaddie level, Sarah Oliver reports in the Mail on Sunday that "the British soldiers loathe the dirtiness of Iraq and the native population's slothfulness, kleptomania and determination to do as little as possible for themselves".



There have been reports of US troops outside Falluja talking of the fun of being a sniper, of the different ways to kill people, of the "rat's nest" that needs cleaning out. Some will say soldiers will be soldiers. But that language has been used by neocons at the heart of the US administration; both Kenneth Adelman and Paul Wolfowitz have spoken of "snakes" and "draining the swamps" in the "uncivilised parts of the world". It is implicit in the US administration's position that anyone who does not agree that all of history has been moving towards a glorious pinnacle expressed in the US political, ideological and economic system has "rejected modernity"; that it is America's mission to civilise and to punish.



I've seen a photo of a young American soldier with two Iraqi boys. There is no nakedness or torture, but it is no less nasty for that. The boys are holding a cardboard sign. They and the soldier are smiling and doing a thumbs up. He is pointing at the cardboard sign, on which he's written: "Lcpl Boudreaux killed my Dad. then he knocked up my sister!" Imagine the scene: Lance Corporal Boudreaux, a soldier on a liberating, civilising mission, asks the natives to pose for a "memento". He gives them the sign to hold. What lie did he tell them about its message? "Iraq is liberated", or "Mission accomplished"? And who, in this scene, is the more civilised?



The one good thing in all of this is that there are soldiers in the US and British armies who could not live with what was happening and who blew the whistle. The world needs to see the photos coming out of Iraq not as "deviant" but as an authentic message from the heart of the thought system that is seeking to control our planet.

Rick Perlstein joins David Montgomery in sending a letter to Alan Brinkley



Remember a few years back when you were good to allow me to join you and several other Columbia professors and graduate students at a dinner for a visiting scholar, and the subject turned to the Columbia grad students’ organizing drive? One of your colleagues, another prominent scholar of liberalism--and, one would think, a liberal--made the by-then familiar point (call it the Eli Yale Shuffle) that unionization was a good thing for everyone except graduate students, who really are the blessed of the earth.



I told this professor he was saying the exact same things a benevolent but anti-union employer like Barry Goldwater used to say: that unions are hardly necessary where the workplace relationship is not just one of boss and bossed, but also one complexified by trust, familiarity, respect, even monitorship. I noted that since I was the only one present who had been a member of a graduate student union (during two years in the American culture program at the University of Michigan), I had some standing to personally confirm a general principle every fan of the Wagner Act would understand: that by formalizing a relationship that otherwise would have otherwise been grounded in the whim of the employer, the presence of a union seemed to increase, not decrease, the measure of trust between professors and graduate students at the University of Michigan.



I don’t know if you agreed with me that night or not. I thought then that you did. I do know, however, that you understood the argument in its every particular--because you helped explain it to your colleague when he chose to act obtuse.

UPDATE: So to summarize the rant below, i guess my real question is: why does Yale's ministry of propaganda think that a piece which calls a description of sexual assault a crass ploy for attention constitutes "good press" for the university?



Considering the fact that Yale's Office of Public Affairs (sorry, couldn't resist an old google bomb) never links to anything at all critical of the university, its shocking and outrageous that tey would link to this screed, a vicious, cruel, and totally wrong-headed attack on Naomi Wolff and, well, women's sexual empowerment. Wolff correctly noted and attacked Yale's institutional obscuscatory tactics and refusal to condemn sexual harassment or commit to working towards a just framework to deal with this issue - (one knowledgeable individual on this topic has argued that prof-student daterape is now a far less pressing issue than student-student rape, assault, and/or harassment on Yale's campus). Instead of admitting that Wolff was right, or even being its usual obfuscatory, lying self and saying "umm, we'll look into it," the university has its propaganda ministry link to this disgusting peice of trash (which they actually copied from the WSJ into PDF form so we could all read it without having to register online to the paper,) which more or less proves Wolff's point about Yale and makes me digusted and ashamed.

Update: Saqib voted for me, apparently. Well, the whole thing's pretty redonculous, but what the hell.

The Saybrook College Class of 2004 has voted me "Most likely to be the one to take down the corrupt CEO." I'm flattered, but i also wonder why Saqib, whose involvement with stuff like Yale Peace, SJP, and the UOC dates back at least to the beginning of sophomore year, wasn't offered similar accolades. Is this because images of heroic masculine activists, problematic in themselves, are images of heroic white activists? Enh, ok, i'll shut up and go do work now, i guess.

Terry Eagleton on Paxton's Anatomy of Fascism



Exactly what fascism consists of, however, is far less clear. In some leftist circles, the word is lobbed loosely around to vilify anyone in the cramped space to the right of Conrad Black. Yet fascists are radicals, unlike right-wing conservatives. Conservatives believe in God, tradition, the monarchy, civilisation and the individual, whereas fascists are pagan, primitivist, collectivist state-worshippers who prefer jackboots to crowns. Fascists admire productive workers (including productive capitalists) and denounce effete aristocrats and the idle rich; conservatives tend to champion both groups, among whose ranks they themselves can frequently be found. Ezra Pound was a fascist, but T S Eliot was a conservative. Fascists strut, while conservatives lounge. From a right-wing viewpoint, there is not much to distinguish fascists from Marxists, except that fascists are marginally more tolerable.



Conservatives disdain the popular masses, while fascists mobilise and manipulate them. Some conservatives believe in ideas, but fascists have a marked preference for myths. If they think at all, they think through their blood, not their brain. Fascists regard themselves as a youthful, revolutionary avant-garde out to erase the botched past and create an unimaginably new future. This includes ditching conventional distinctions between political left and right, a point that ought to worry partisans of the Third Way rather more than it seems to.



Fascism is an anti-political kind of politics, which elevates national unity over class distinctions, gut prejudice over ideological debate, and race over reason

***

If fascism claimed to be radical, it was a bogus revolution that never once put its anti-capitalist rhetoric into practice. Instead, it set about efficiently exterminating the political left. For all their crafty appeals to lower-middle-class grouses, fascist regimes left existing patterns of property and social class largely intact. The disgruntled petite bourgeoisie were taken for the longest ride in their unenviable history. With breathtaking insolence, the fascists used aspects of their ideology to prop up the very state that they found so oppressive.



The book could have said more about the curious time-warping involved in fascism - the way in which it is archaic and avant-garde, mythological and technological, at the same time. In this, it resembles the cultural modernism with which it had intimate (if ambiguous) relations. The Holocaust was both barbarism and the triumph of a "scientific", full-bloodedly modern rationality. If it was a revolt against Enlightenment reason for some thinkers, it was the consummation of it for others. Old-fashioned pogroms, Paxton points out, would have taken 200 years to complete what the Nazis' more advanced technology achieved in three years.