recommended if you like live shows

The RIYL show was fantastic. I give Chris Maher (of Morningsides fame) mad props for starting a record label - and one with such amazing bands. I'd heard two of the Morningsides' songs on the internet about two years ago - "Summer Song" and "A Molehill is a Mound" - but i hadn't seen Chris join Sam Grossman and John Dydo on stage since the dissolution of Shamus McNasty, so seeing them play together was sort of a revelation. Sam remains a fantastic songwriter, both in the pop-rock of the morningsides and the more recent collaboration with Simon Beins and John that is the Wowz. I'd heard a few of the Morningsides tracks online several years ago, but they played one unrecorded track which was terriffic. The Wowz' final song, "Groups With Guitars Are On The Way Out," was amazing. Folks should pick up the "Morningsides ''7 Single and the Wowz' upcoming CD Nicotine Bubblegum, the latter of which i will prbably be posting a review of in the near future. The other bands that played were all impressive - particulalrly Daggerhearts, whose innovative melodies were compelling and addictive, and The Fugue, although I wish they'd let Ben get off the drum kit (where he did a great job) and grab a guitar. Andrew (who i hadn't seen in like four years - not since Youngerman made us stop outside S-'s party none of us were invited to) and Alex said that Automato's in the process of writing new material. I'm excited to hear it.

The Wowz

Sam Grossman and John Dydo's new band, The Wowz, are playing a show at Galapagos Artspace on North Sixth in Williamsburg tonight at eight with a bunch of other artists, including Chris Maher, their former bandmate in Shamus McNasty and again in The Morningsides. If you can't make it, you should still check out their website.



Last night someone found my old website by googling my last name. It's always unsettling when someone else is googling you. Come forward if you're the culprit!

Post #201, Pataki Vetoes minimum wage increase, and a few more songs

The last post was number 200, so belated happy 200th post to The Problem Of Leisure blog. Hopefully the state legislature will, as phoebe suggests, override governor pataki's veto, and hopefully said veto will mean that come the next election, Dennis Rivera of District 1199 and the eladership of other progressive unions who recognize that the fate of the labor movement and that of unorganized low-wage workers are inexorably linked, won't be backing Pataki anymore, not even for the amazing health insurance and card check legislation they won last time around. With that taken care of (and by the way, if you haven't seen either Spider-Man 2 or Metallica:Some Kind Of Monster yet, i highly recommend both,) i guess it's time to continue with my Rosenberg-inspired protest soundtrack.



13.Song number thirteen is yet another song by the Clash. Combat Rock's "Rock The Casbah" offers a subtle but explicit critique of european colonialism and oil nationalism in the middle east, as well as enduring conflicts between a secular and westernized elite and popular religion and fundamentalist revolt, which can speak, more than two decades later, not simply to the chaos and insanity of the neoconservative project of remaking southwest asia, but also its scope and importance to the neocon imperial global imaginary. The song's video featured armadillos, oil derricks, rabbis with peyesses(sp?) and Arabs with Kaffiyehs (the latter two fratronizing in the front seat of a "brand new cadillac.") The terror the Bush administration has unleashed upon the world which overwhelmingly opposed its war may prove to be no less as frenetic, and, indeed, moreso.



14.and 15.For similar reasons, Outkast's "Bombs over Baghdad" deserves a spot on the compilation. One of SpeakerBoxxx's best tracks, Big Boi's polemic against Bush's "War" on iraqis and on african americans was probably heard by more people this year than any other song on this list thus far, with the possible exception of Rock The Casbah. But not only has it reached a wide audience, it's also a great antiwar song and a keen analysis of the world as managed by the bush doctrine, and the agency of black cultural producers in confronting the homeland security state.

W-A-Rrah, there'll be no tomorrow but sorrow

and horror will follow the hollow hearts battle for dollars

Politicians, modern day magicians

Physicians of death, more health care for poor health

Who makin us ill, they makin us kill

That's makin me spill my guts (chill Big, lay in the cut)

For what? I refuse to sit in the backseat and get handled

Like I do nuttin all day but sit around watch the Cartoon Channel

I rap about, the Presidential election and the scandal

that followed, and we all watched the nation, as it swallowed

and chalked it up, basically America you got FUCKED

The media shucked and jived now we stuck - damn!

16.Cheap Trick, "I Want You To Want Me." Unlike in "Surrender," Nielsen et al. do not here caution the song's object to not "give [her](?)self away" to the power of male desire, but instead simply articulate their need for adulation. This seems an apt metaphor of they ways in which both Bush and Kerry construct their respective electorates in ways which render them subject, delimited, their abilities to contest and reconfigure the terms of their relationship to the candidate curbed by desperation and fear. Disagreement is welcome.



17.Reflection Eternal featuring Mos Def: "This Means You." At the end of next month, the republicans will converge upon New York City. This is a post giuliani New York, a new york visibly altered by the neoliberal initiatives of the bllomberg administration. Perhaps no other song describes the vast changes to my hometown over the last decade or so than this track of 2000's Reflection Eternal/Train Of Thought. Mos Def's verse is unyielding.

Things changed in New York, type strange in New York

Forty-Deuce don't look the same in New York

Just politics, tricks and big games in New York

Switched trains a writer can't get fame in New York

Internet and Wall Street got paid in New York

Poor folks and workin class got slayed in New York

Even still, everyday they make weight in New York

Flashlights lookin for a brighter day in New York

In New York they say it's - red hot

Will the temperature ease up? Black I guess not

It's multi-lane traffic, no sign for rest stops

No corner breaks, put on your gloves and just box

No dance school to teach you to wop and bus stop

Better get up in the booth, hop up and just rock

If you think it's like that, it's not so just stop

All mankind time runnin down on one watch, just watch

or, as Big Boi puts it, "Tic Tic Boom."

18. Jadakiss featuring Anthony Hamilton, "Why." A powerful track which asks a series of questions essential to the conflicts the political contest hinges upon and those it seeks to erase.

Sountrack Part II

Alyssa's inclusion of "Let's Talk About Sex" and "Die Trying" are strokes of genius, but i'm not done yet



9.The Wailers: "Small Axe." Because corporate power and the state are indeed a big tree, and we are a small axe, ready to cut them down, willing to chop them down.



10.Bob Marley and The Wailers: "Crazy Baldhead" - Because we need to chase the RNC out of town and the Neocons and Neoliberals out of power.



11.Peter Tosh, "Equal Rights." "Anyone but Bush" isn't sufficient. "Everyone is crying out for peace, nobody's crying out for justice. I don't want no peace. I want equal rights and justice."



12.Wu-Tang Clan - Protect Ya Neck. Anticipating the security-state and its permutations, Inspectah Deck informs us that the Wu-Tang Clan will "terrorize the jam like troops in Pakistan."



More later.

I ain't no joke

Eric B. and Rakim's lead track off the classic Paid In Full seems a proper response to this disgusting suggestion by the Bush administration. But what might my answer to Alyssa's political soundtrack look like? Here, in no particular order, is one attempt.



1.No list of "political music" (and i'd argue that all cultural production is "political") woudl be complete without Operation Ivy's "Freeze Up," in which lyricist/vocalist Jesse Michaels offers a powerful critique of the ravages of deindustrialization, the informatization of production, and the Reaganite ordering of global difference

One nation stands the tallest radiating blinding light.

Plastic and fluorescent energy robbing us of sight

Set in our way content with our decay

We wave the flag of freedom as we conquer and invade

Ever ask yourself wheres my place in this hell?

But no one's there to tell you cause they dont know that themselves

The well-rehearsed lines from our elated politicians

No longer offer solace we can see the self destruction.

2.Talib Kweli: "The Proud." This one seems to obvious, dealing with the failures of the Civil Rights Movement and the racialized brutality of bi-partisan "zero tolerance" policing initiatives.

It's just the beginning, the first inning

Battle for America's soul, thedevil's winning

The President is Bush, the Vice President's a Dick

So a whole lot of fuckin is what we gon' get

They don't wanna raise the babies so the election is fixed

That's why we don't be fuckin with politics

They bet on that, parents fought and got wet for that

Hosed down, bit by dogs, and got blacks into house arrest for that

It's all good except for that - we still poor

3.The (International) Noise Conspiracy - "Bigger Cages, Longer Chains" and "New Empire Blues" (I'm still waiting for Armed Love to be released in the US. When it does, this list may expand.) The former is a searing indictment of reformist politics with a killer saxophone intro. "Let's get together, get organized, and baby, let's set ourselves free." The latter is a rocking and insurrectionary Negri/Amin/Spivak-inspired interrogation of imperial power.

4.Sleater-Kinney, "Call The Doctor." The republican attempt to define personhood and citizenship through the institution of heterosexual marriage, and the democrats' refusal to demand that love, (and ballots, and unions) be recognized regardless of gender have been troubling elements of this electoral contest. Luckily, we have Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein (Janet Weiss had not yet joined the band when this, the lead track for their second album, was released.) Tucker and Brownstein's rage against the scientific categorization of bodies and attempts to control women's sexuality is a call to resist legislative attempts to excise queer relationships from the constitutional definition of citizenship.

5.Sleater-Kinney, "One Beat." Perhaps the best Sleater-Kinney song ever, 2002's lead-off track for what may be America's best rock band's sixth CD links concerns over imperial scientific discourse, the construction of gender, and imperialist war machinery in a single verse which asks:

If you think like Thomas Edison, can you invent

a world for me?

Now all that's on the surface

are bloody arms and oil

fields

could i turn this place all upside down

and shake you and your

fossils out

6.The Clash, "Washington Bullets." Alternatively, "Police On my Back" provides a welcome analysis of America in the age of "Infinite Detention," and "Career Opportunities" gives the lie to Bush's claims of job creation. But Sandinista's "Washington Bullets" takes a systematic look at how certain imperial efforts to instantiate global stability have resulted in bloodshed and terror.

and if you can find a Afghan rebel

That the Moscow bullets missed

Ask him what he thinks of voting Communist

Ask the Dalai Lama in the hills of

Tibet,

How many monks did the Chinese get?

In a war-torn swamp stop any

mercenary,

and check the British bullets in his armoury

Que? Sandinista!

7. Dead Kennedys, "terminal preppie." Bush's Theme Song. Probably Kerry's, too, for that matter.

8.The Coup, "Underdogs," and "Lazy Muthafucka" because tens of millions in this country live in poverty without health insurance, while the Joe Zaccagninos, David Swensens, Roland Bettses, Theresa Heinz Kerrys, Kenny Boy Lays, and Rupert Murdochs hold untold billions which they never toiled to earn.

to be continued

I just woke up from a dream in which Judith Butler and Antonio Banderas were in love.  Antonio Banderas asked Judith Butler to marry him, but Judith Butler was all like "i don't think so, buddy."

Fuck the yankees.  Fuck A-rod especially, though.

I just got the shortest haircut i've had in years, possibly ever.  It's a good haircut though, so i'm not complaining, and actually feeling wind on the back of my neck is sort of a welcome sensation, particularly when it's 85 degrees out and i've just walked four miles.  I'm listening to Miles' On The Corner and revisiting my John Mclaughlin obsession from high school.

 

I think i saw Catherine O., who i went to high school with, on the street waiting at the 106th street bus stop on broadway, but it could easily have been someone else.  She didn't see, recognize, or acknowledge me - Another case of my hair disguising my identity or something.

 

My friends Austin and Elan are stuck in a small town in the Yukon at the moment with a broken transmission.  Hopefully it'll get fixed and they'll be on their way soon.  Quoth Austin, "I like to keep a nice 8 to 10 year old demeanor.  It is part of my charm"

 

And to conclude this uncharacteristically schizophrenic blog entry, i want to issue a challenge to Alyssa or Josh to rewrite Boogie Down Production's 1987 classic diss track "The Bridge Is Over" as a Yale Labor Anthem along the lines of "The Woodbridge Is Over," transforming its homophobic and sexist diction into an indictment of yale's corporate administrators.  Judging by recent events, you'll need it come spring semester, so get cracking!

It's truly disgusting that this case had to happen in the first place, especially here in New York where even the fascists come to exploit our multiethnic cultural capital.  This seems like yet another instance in which the New York City police department hasd demonstrated its racialized understandings of "Courtesy, Professionalism, and Respect."  But some are finding good news in the decision of the city's Human Rights Commission. 

"It's a tremendous moment for the Sikh community, one of our first big civil rights victories in this country," said Prabhjot Singh, a director of the Sikh Coalition, a civil and human rights organization.

Bush plagiarizes a dartmouth undegrad.  And badly, too.  Did he learn how to do this at Yale

Yet another upsetting dream: I was visiting my high school and saw friends from my grade - Dawn, Vicky, Leah, some others - sitting on the upper quad.  When i walked over to say hi, they scattered, clearly not wanting anything to do with me.  Lauren was there for a second, until my dream-mind registered that as an impossibility, which was pretty heart-wrenching, to say the least.  I've been trying to decide whether this dream was thematically linked to the one i reported yesterday.

 

Last night's "nostalgia" post was in retrospect pretty pointless and i'm not sure where it cam from or why i felt compelled to post it.

 

The new issue of businessweek has two interesting articles about card check that are worth reading.

 

That's all for now, maybe more later, maybe not.

The vernacular usage of the term "nostalgia" doesn't really do justice to the root meaning of the word.  Nostos is a return, whereas "algia" refers to a pain (hence the english word analgesic as a synonym for a painkiller.)   The current english usage of the word, i contend, fails to incorporate this "pain of returning," of remembering, the implied violence of desiring a return to that which has vanished and cannot truly be revisited.  I tend to be a nostalgic person, particularly during extended fits of inactivity such as that which i have essentially been guilty of for the last several months (job interview today went ok, i think) and this nostalgia is always painful. 

 

(Note that this nostalgia is personal, pertaining to interconnectedness and relationships rather than institutions - i don't miss college, or high school at all, and feel no pain in returning to ponder the politics of such affiliations, though i try not to do so.  Though i am frustrated by the atomization of the past few months, the pain of nostos for me is sort of a reluctant acknowledgement of interpersonal entropy.)

 

I didn't make it up to Kim's today, because of the interview and then Anchorman and then it was raining like N-Dobbity was gonna get a call on his cell from the big guy tellin him to call up Lee Perry and start rebuilding Black Ark.  (Ok, that was bad.)  I would like to acquire some new music though, even if i'm not quite sure what's on the list at the moment.  I keep looking for the Plastic Constellations CD, which they never have.  I still haven't heard Tyrannosaurus Hives or The Tipping Point, or figured out whether or not Armed Love ever got released.  i would like to check out the Microphones' It Was Hot, We Stayed in the Water, which they never seem to have at Kim's, The Wrens' Seacaucus.  Taking advice from Pitchfork (gasp) I also want to check out There's a Riot Goin' On or maybe the Constantines' album or the Books' Thought For Food.  So much music, so little money...

At this point, this editorial is pretty much ex post facto - coming, as it does, a week after Mayor Bloomberg forced UFPJ to agree to the West Side Highway location.  This editorial is nice, and everything, but it follows in the YDN tradition (not surprising given how many YDN alumni wind up running the new york times - ah, the elite corridors of informatized production) of coming out in support of contentious issues after the point has been essentially rendered moot.

 

On a completely unrelated note, sometime in the last few days, without me noticing, my sidebar seems to have returned to normal.  Rock! 

I had another weird dream last night.  It was one of those dreams you wake up from and you don't really want to move because you're too busy trying to sift apart all the symbols and subtexts and meanings and persuade yourself that it was just your insecurities bubbling to the surface of your subconscious, and you didn't really do any of the things you dreamed you felt ashamed of doing.  Ah well.  I'll probably have more dreams to complain about tomorrow, at this rate.  (although some of them haven't been that bad.)

 

Anchorman was very funny.  I found the first 15 minutes or so to be a bit slow, but after that my brother and i more or less spent an hour and a half laughung uncontrollably in a mostly empty theater.  I'm a little baffled by Will Ferrel's obsession with Kansas.  (The band, not the state.)  But, as Ted pointed out to Socrates (Soh-Krates,) "all we are is dust in the wind, dude.  Dust.  Wind.  Dude.)

 

I bought the plane tickets, and it's decided.  I'm heading out to Tucson to visit the Julie-Ana-Burkee-Noah-Shikha-Evelyn-Amelia (who am i missing?) axis of voter registration and antiracist organizing.  This should be fun.  I'm flying into Phoenix, and i haven't been in the Phoenix airport since my 20th birthday, when a friend's parents left me there at 2 in the morning after a severe cultural misunderstanding.  But I think three years is enough cooling off time between me and Arizona, and i haven't really spent any time in the area around Tucson, and it will be great to see some dear friends i already miss way too much and to vacate my parents' apartment and the city of new york for a bit.

Three CGEU reportbacks, from GESO blogging trifecta Evan Cobb, mcplunk, and Robin Herlands, seem to suggest that the conference was a success and that there's an exciting and powerful movement fighting for the rights of academic workers to organize, and that this movement isn't going to silently allow the Bush administration and its allies in academia to destroy the future of teaching and research.  This is great news.



My brother's back in town from the Czech republic, and we're about to go see Anchorman.  More blogging later, probably.

 

One question: why is it fine for Dick Cheney to tell Leahy to go fuck himself, while Theresa Heinz telling some reporter to shove it elicits righteous indignation from CNN?  Doesn't this strike anyone as a little bit sexist?

 

Ok, no more defending statist bourgie democrats (Heinz is like a republican anyway, right?) on this blog.  Especially not ones whose first husbands crashed their planes onto my old elementary school.

I just finished Judith Butler's new(est) book, Precarious Life, this morning.  It's a powerful meditation on, among other things, the racialization of mourning and "grievability," the Foucauldian implications of Rumsfeld and Ashcroft's "Infinite Detention" of "enemy combatants," The anti-Semitism of the position of those such as Lawrence Summers (and David White) that criticism of the israeli state and of zionism as a racialized ideological formation is tantamount to Jew-hatred, and on the antifeminist implications of the belated "feminist" justifications for the invasion of Afghanistan.  It's powerful, well-written, and the most accessible Butler book i've ever read, so i'm heavily recommending it to my five or so readers, some of whom i think will be especially drawn to Butler's attempts to locate a Jewish ethics of non-violence.  You can get a copy here.

Wouldn't the state department be better served in going after Henry Kissinger than this guy?

Ehrenreich has a great column in the times today about Wal-Mart as a global sweatshop, which, like Yale, depends on the state to provide benefits to many of its employees rather than actually provide them itself.

Sometime in my second year of college, Katie, whose birthday it is today, so happy birthday Katie(!), told me that she didn't think of Pittsburgh as her home anymore, that New Haven had become the center of her existence.  At the time, i was in this mode where i wanted New York to represent an escape to normalcy and humanity from all the fucked up things i saw Yale University doing to its workers, to its students, to its city, and to the world.  I didn't want to think of Yale as the center of my social existence, and i had yet to really establish enough of a relationship with new haven as a city to have it feel like a home.  Sometime in between the GSA Town Hall meeting at which Bob Proto decimated the argument that graduate teachers and researchers were less deserving of a voice on the job than pipefitters like himself and hundreds of graduate students, both those inside YUAG and those locked out by the administration demanded answers from Susan Hockfield, and September 25, 2002, when seven hundred workers, pastors, community members, and students put ourselves on the line to demand that the university negotiate in good faith with its employees - all eight thousand of its employees seeking collective bargaining agreements, and with the community as well, my imagined locus for "home" shifted from the hudson river to the Elm City.  I think this process was really inseparable from the organizing that i was doing and from all the shit that happened over  the summer of 02 and the craziness but also exhilaration of the buildup to war and to the march strike.

 

Now i no longer live in new haven.  I've returned to my parents' apartment in New York, returned to aimlessly walking in great 4 mile long circles hoping to bump into people i know so i don't feel so damn lonely and then feeling dirty and awkward when i do bump into folks.  The problem is that New York doesn't feel like home anymore, but i'm kind of stuck here.  And i need to get off my ass and find a job but i'm worried that that will keep me here and that that isn't where i should be.

I'm amused by josh's post about my repudiation of Nader's rightward turn, but i really was never in Nader's camp to begin with.  I was then and remain a skeptic about the ability of Nader to actually organize movements capable of countering corporate power.  Nader's "progress" is no less bourgeois than Kerry's, and i voted for him in 2000 not because i belived his agenda was really in sync with the post-seattle social movements for global justice, but because he wasn't Al Gore, he wasn't espousing murderous sanctions on the iraqi people or supporting state terror to police the Rogue States of the Global South.  Nader's rightward shift, his overtures to Buchanan's anti-immigrant racists and to the populist right make his candidacy one which i will never support.

More trouble at the Yale Medical Center...

WATERBURY - Three doctors who sued Yale University, claiming they were retaliated against after they raised concerns about misdiagnoses that endangered patients' lives and Medicare fraud, won more than $5.5 million in a verdict issued Friday. Yale will appeal the verdict, said Thomas Conroy, spokesman for Yale University. The doctors, Morton Burrell, Arthur Rosenfield and Robert Smith, filed the lawsuit in 2000. They claim they were retaliated against with salary cuts and removal from positions of authority after they criticized the treatment of patients in the diagnostic radiology department in the School of Medicine. The six-member Superior Court jury concluded the men spoke out as concerned citizens and Yale intentionally subjected them to discipline because of their comments.

You know, it really couldn't have happened to a nicer medical center.  I'm shocked, shocked that Yale would place profit over patients' well being.

A commercial i just saw encouraging viewers of MTV2 to join the army special forces (call this number to recieve your free video) depicts a group of men wearing cloth head coverings loading what appear to be objects pertaining to weapons of mass destruction program related activities into a truck.  Through a yellowish, infrared vision goggle hue, our narrator informs us that these ethnicized and racialized representations of "the enemy" are being monitored by heroic american troops who are heroically starving themselves past the limit of their rations in order to monitor the terrorists.  We never "see" the GIs, we're just told that they are present, watching from their concealed location, heroically starving themselves.  That we don't see them is interesting, because it not only makes possible the suggestion of the advertisement that if we are masculine enough to starve ourselves and face death and possibly beheading, it could very well be "us" in the concealed, supposedly omniscient/mute and invisible object position of the heroic soldier, but also marks this position as racially ambiguous.  Although we're clearly meant to assume that this possible us/invisible object is "different" from the Kaffiyeh-clad targets of "our" surveillance,  the postmodern soldier is multiethnic but invisible.

 

And then, of course, there's the whole "we fuck you over and thus you are a hero" thing, which seems like a bizarre way of recruiting poor kids to die, not "for a mistake," but rather for something which was, from the outset, wholly deliberate.

Concerning Girlie-Men

I'm sure you've heard all about this by now, but Governor Arnold "True Lies" Schwarzenegger referred to democrats attempting to block two anti-labor budget measures repealing laws preventing schools from subcontracting and permitting workers to sue employers to enforce labor laws.  For supporting these pro-worker measures, Schwarzenegger called the democrats "Girlie Men", referred to election day as "judgment day," and called republicans "terminators".  First, it's clear that the term "Girlie Men" is profoundly homophobic.  The notion that support for workers rights is an effeminizing trait in Schwarzenegger's understanding of the world is clearly very telling about the gender politics of "compassionate conservatism." 

 

What's bizarre is that the term "girlie men" originates not with Schwarzenegger himself, but with Dana Carvey and Kevin Nealon's "Hans and Franz" Saturday Night Live skits in the late '80s and early '90s.  Schwarzenegger's political masculinist performance is nothing more than a bizarre caricature of his own filmic self-representation as sarcastically imagined by unflattering impersonators.  And, lest we forget, "judgment day" in the Terminator Cycle was the date at which evil semisentient robots detonated massive nuclear strikes against humanity and destroyed civilization as we know it, except for Claire Danes.  That's either not a particularly useful metaphor for the democratic process, or it's a profoundly telling comment about how republicans understand their relationship to the rights of working people.

Kerry declares "zero tolerance" on gangs, appropriating right wing racialized discursive constructions about the criminality of urban youth.

 

And the Human Rights Campaign declares zero tolerance on Margaret Cho, "uninviting her" from a celebration of "GLBT strength and unity."

 

So much for "The Democracy."

And on a more personal note...

I'm feeling really frustrated again about living in my parents' apartment, thousands of miles and a bunch of time zomes away from most of the folks i care about, jobless and isolated and feeling like i've totally wasted my summer and my life is just ticking away before my eyes.  I guess the solution would be to get up and do something, and i have an application i need to start and an interview on tuesday, but this job would mean staying in New York and living with my parents and i'm not too sure i want to do, or that i even want this job, but I don't really know what alternative i have at this point.  I haven't left NYC since i came back here.  I've left manhattan only three times - twice last week, hanging out with Vic in Brooklyn last Thursday  and then taking the Q train out to Coney Island for the Siren Music Festival on Saturday,and when i went to the Mets game with Alyssa, Lev, and Rogoff back in June.  I spent weeks barely leaving my room, and my 8 miles a day feel as routinized and as desperate as always.  Don't get me wrong.  I love my parents, and i am grateful to them for giving me a roof over my head and food on my plate while i figure my life out, but i'd rather be somewhere else, with someone else, doing something else.  I'm complaining too much, but i feel like i'm at this point right now where this blog represents a lion's share of my verbal contact wiuth the world outside this apartment, and that's pathetic and frightening, and depressing.  I'm going to shut up now.

Another disgusting NLRB decision.

WASHINGTON — In a decision affecting a huge majority of the workforce, the National Labor Relations Board ruled that non-union workers have no absolute right to take colleagues with them to face the boss when they fear they're about to be disciplined. Reversing a 2000 decision, and by a 3-2 party-line vote, the board said only unionized workers have an absolute right to bring colleagues--or, to be precise, union representatives--with them. The non-union workers can ask the boss to let colleagues accompany them to the discipline hearings, but the boss can turn them down, the board's 3-person GOP majority ruled. NLRB's June 9 decision threw out a case by three IBM workers, who wanted colleagues to accompany them to discipline hearings. IBM is non-union, despite efforts by Alliance@IBM, a CWA affiliate, to organize Big Blue.

Meanwhile San Diego Teamsters are striking Coca-Cola to protect their health care benefits.  On Long Island, two picketing carpeters outside the site of a P.C. Richards store were killed by an unlicensed driver.  6 others were hurt in the accident.

For the record, i always gravitated towards the "staring blankly into space, possibly drooling" school of guitar faces 



Well, i fixed the justification problem, but the sidebar still won't come back up.  Anyone got any ideas?

Just returned from my second long walk of the day, this one accompanied by my mom, which was fun.  I still need help getting the code in my sidebar left-justified again.  If anyone knows what i need to do, please please please let me know.  (That means you, phoebe or alyssa, whose coding skills are far superior to mine.  Sorry Josh, i love ya, but i trust you about as much with electronics as i do with directions.)

 

Like Evan, i have also been told that i resemble Harry Potter.  Not by 36 year old men in gay chatrooms, but, in fact, by my roomate for the past two years, Grace, right before she decided to cut my hair back in october.  (I wonder if that hair-cutting ought to be lumped, in retrospect, into the larger trend of post-strike hair mutilation by UOC members, by which i was initially so repulsed.) 

 

Michael Berube, a Penn State Cultural Studies Professor who is a staunch defender of the graduate student labor movement, in a blog entry today places the blame for last week's execrable NLRB disgrace on none other than Ralph Nader. 

 

Full disclosure: I voted for Nader in 2000, albeit in a district (New Haven's first ward) where Nader beat Bush and Gore beat both by a huge landslide and in a state which Gore carried easily.  Had i not voted for Nader, i would not have voted, because 1) Gore was running a right wing campaign i, as an anarchist, would never have been able to support, and 2)as a New York resident then transplanted to New Haven, Connecticut, my vote wouldn't have made a difference no matter who i voted for.  I ultimately voted not because i was enthusiastic about Nader - i was and remain deeply skeptical about electoral models of social change, and Nader's latest campaign has made concessions to the far right on the critical issue of immigration, employing the discourse of "absorbtion rates" and illegality, which i find completely unnaceptable.  I voted in the 2000 election because i felt like it, and i didn't vote again until 2003, when i voted for Vic Edgerton's ward 9 alder campaign.  (He lost to Elizabeth Addonizio, who had the backing of New Haven's democratic party machine and still hasn't secured the construction of that monorail promised in her campaign literature.)  In the 2004 election, i will vote, i think, even though my vote will mean nothing in this election, because George W. Bush is a fascist and voting him out is just one more of many nonviolent ways in which i plan to tell his administration to do what Mr Cheney urged Senator Leahy to pursue on the senate floor last month.  And i'll vote for Kerry, not Nader, because this time around i think the Nader campaign is, as i have said, deeply problematic, because i don't trust him any more than i trust Kerry (which is not very much at all, and because my vote means nothing either way, and because Kerry supports Card Check Neutrality agreements which the Bush recess appointee-stacked NLRB is threatening to rule against.

 

Ok, now that all that's out of the way, i think Berube's argument here doesn't hold weight.  I have never accepted the argument that Ralph Nader is responsible for the Bush presidency.  Had Gore engaged with his party's left wing in an honest way during the 2000 elections, had he continued to fight the legislative and de facto disenfranchisement of black voters in Florida and of thousands of others through ballot "malfunction," Bush could have been soundly beaten.  Positing Nader as the individual ultimately responsible for Bush's presidency, let alone the NLRB dismisses as inevitable a concrete set of processes through which a New Haven born scion of privilege essentially bought or was given state power through an alliance of powerful capitalist interests, radical right wing politicians, and the power structure of the New Right fundamentalist movements.  Even Kerry has made more overtures to the post-Seattle social movements than his predecessor on the Democratic ticket.  Berube's attack on Nader strikes me as not sufficiently differentiating itself from alarmist denunciations of unwitting fifth-columnists who have accidentally hand-delivered the country and the fate of the academic labor movement to monolithic right-wing forces of ineffable damnation.  I don't think this was ever the case.  Gore won the 2000 election after all, and is not president today not because of Ralph Nader, but rather a complex set of occurences which tranpired prior to, during, and following the election and for which we ought to blame the Bush family, Katherine Harris, and five supreme court justices.  But what seems more important to me is that we look elsewhere than Nader for the structural causes of the NLRB decision  Although, as i noted in my comments on Mr. Berube's blog, i have questions about whether this is really a worthwhile pursuit at this point.

 

The first guest to sleep at the second Bush White House was Richard Charles Levin, the neoliberal economist president of Yale University, whose antiunion management tactics have been well documented and whose administration's outrageous union busting and attempts intimidate and discriminate against what i believe is the longest currently active organizing drive at a private university Berube has discussed powerfully in his contribution to the "Yale Strike Dossier" in Social Text 49 and later included in Cary Nelson ed., Will Teach For Food: Academic Labor In Crisis.  Levin has been perhaps the strongest and most influential voice against graduate student organizing at private universities, joined by administrators like Columbia president Lee Bollinger and University of Pennsylvania's outgoing president Judith Rodin, a former anti-union dean of Yale's graduate school.  Since their post-election rapprochement, Levin and Bush seem to be getting along famously - the first family stayed at the Levins' house when George delivered his commencement address to the graduating class of 2001  and Bush named Slick Rick to his farcical "weapons of mass destruction" panel back in February.  (Leading to my whole "weapons of class instruction" schtick, in case anyone forgot.  I'm milking it for all i can.)  I agree very much that the Brown Decision needs to be situated in the context of the Bush attack on workers, but i think it also needs to be seen in the context of the long and sordid history of university administrators using whatever means available to them to try crush movements to create more just, democratic, and diverse visions of the academy.  This seems both a more immediate and more profound place to locate the culpability, as it were, for last week's decision.  The question which remains then, is "what do we do about it."  (And "elect Kerry" doesn't seem nearly enough given the fact that even with a Kerry victory, as Phoebe has noted, it may take years before this ruling can be thrown out.)  Clearly, this weekend's CGEU conference at Columbia is going to be very important.  I feel like we should start mobilizing as soon as possible - those of us who aren't currently graduate employees - not only to defend the right to organize, but to push for the vision of teaching and learning that unions like GSEU, GET-UP, GSOC, and GESO have been struggling to make possible.

 

Note: this post took over two hours to complete and i'm not sure how coherent it wound up being.  I guess i'll have to shore up loose ends tomorrow or something.

on an entirely different tip, can anyone tell me what i need to do to fix my code?



And by the way, this is post #175, which, combined with the 325 from the old site, makes 500.  Wow

Another case of corporations profiting from the war.

A six-month examination by The New York Times, drawing on military and court records and interviews with dozens of industry executives and servicemen and women, has found that several financial services companies or their agents are using questionable tactics on military bases to sell insurance and investments that may not fit the needs of people in uniform.



Insurance agents have made misleading pitches to "captive" audiences like the ones at Fort Benning. They have posed as counselors on veterans benefits and independent financial advisers. And they have solicited soldiers in their barracks or while they were on duty, violations of Defense Department regulations.



The Pentagon has been aware of practices like these since the Vietnam War; investigations have even cited specific companies and agents. But because of industry lobbying, Congressional pressure, weak enforcement and the Pentagon's ineffective oversight, almost no action has been taken to sanction those responsible or to better protect those who are vulnerable, The Times has found.



And the problem has only intensified since the beginning of the Iraq war, say military employees who monitor insurance agents. With the death toll rising in Iraq, interest in insurance among the troops has surged, making the war a selling opportunity for many agents, they said.

How incestuous.  Methinks, though, Mr. Brooks, that universities might have an easier time avoiding being "professionalized information-transmission systems" (and i think Michael Denning is more correct when he describes the primary function of the university as evaluation - the distribution of grades/transcripts/letters of recommendation as capital - rather than even a professionalized form of "information-transmission,") if they were less intent on lavishing perks and praises on a small elite minority within the professoriat (the Hills, the Blooms, the Gaddises, Kennedys, Kagans et caetera,) while brutally repressing the (omni)presence, and ignoring the vast reliance on and contributions of the majority of adjunct and graduate student instructors (whose pay and benefit packages in no way resemble that of Mr. Hill) but who do around 70% of all of Yale's teaching.  I suspect that at Yale and at universities, colleges, and high schools around the country, there are many far better teachers than "Charlie" Hill, far more committed to their students, (and, to boot, not culpable for the massacre of god knows how many Nicaraguans, but i suppose it isn't polite to talk about that now that Charlie just wants us to bomb those Arabs) not recognized by Brooks not only because of his own ideological biases(for this article is a neocon love fest after all - except for Worthen, i think) but because they may  1) not  encourage the egocentric hero-worship Hill likes to drown himself in (as, i think, do Gaddis and Spence and Kennedy, if to a lesser extent,) and 2) be too busy trying to get some form of job security, or teach seven hours a week while writing books or dissertations or articles to sit for repeated interviews with someone writing a book about them (how the fuck is that a shining example of platonic teaching anyway?) or are wholly excluded from the academic celebrity culture in which Brooks woudl clearly like to situate himself with this piece by virtue of doing academically rigorous work not designed to bolster the neoconservative project of a new american exceptionalist imperial vision.

 

Not to mention the fact that the university has been waging a bloody fight to keep thousands of these teachers silent for the last 17 or so years... 

I just wanted to call attention to Phoebe's excellent post today on the fucked up fascist ruling, which discusses something that's been mostly overlooked so far - what it actually means to have one's right to organize stripped when the bosses start gunning for you...

It's just past 1:30 AM and i can't fall asleep and i'm lonely and frustrated, so I'm listening to The Hot Rock (mostly for the last track, though i think it's one of S-K's best and most underrated as a whole) and, to my not inconsiderable shame (litotes, Ms. Ellis), i'm blogging.  First off Evan's comments on the Now Levin (must) Repay Bush (and no, i don't really think there's any more of a conspiracy than that which normally fuels the engines of capitalist exploitation) ruling are incisive.  Not only is graduate students' work profoundly economic in nature, but so too does their student status make a voice in their work, as well as in their studies, necessary.

So, one partisan board now thinks I'm not an employee. One other important agency, the IRS, still does. Yale itself still gives me an employee number. And they still pay me $2.31 every Wednesday, Thursday and Friday that I teach, because they think that teaching language every day is just that unimportant to the core mission of the university, and that it merits that much disrespect. I have just as many reasons to still fight for a union, and I plan to do just that.

I was glad to read Evan's comments, as well as Josh's analysis (not to mention the comments of Phoebe and Alyssa .  It's also been helpful talking to both Ben and Phoebe about this over the last few days in trying to figure out what i, no loger a college student and not at the moment a graduate student can do to aid the fight against this gross injustice which is a clear attack on any meaningful vision of equal access to education and to any kind of liberative model of learning and academic work and an attempt to invalidate and crush what i've been trying to do for the last six or so years of my life.

 

I was going to post other stuff, like my theory about Grosse Pointe Blank's reworking of the classic scenes and tropes of Heathers and Pretty in Pink, and indeed, Say Anything, (and possibly Pump Up The Volume.)  Or a bunch of other effluvia i want to work out at some point.  But really all i feel like talking about is my frustration at being here right now and at feeling so completely alone.  On the one hand i think one of my fellow unemployed friends was totally correct when she observed that "graduating is horrible."  But i also feel disgust at myself for not having figured something, some kind of a plan out before i left school, and i'm mad at my self for sitting around (or walking around-i've resumed my manic 8 miles a day wanderings for lack of anything better to do) and feeling sorry for myself.  And i miss everyone.  And then i get pissed off at myself for saying shit like that.

 

Alright.  That's enough for tonight, and just in time, because "A Quarter to Three" is winding to a close, and i'm feeling tired.

Happy belated Birthday, Phoebe

I had another dream last night.  No tree-women this time (was she an entwife?) but instead high school teachers - one in particular, who i had a huge amount of respect for and haven't seen in about four years.  Not really sure why he popped into my psyche when i was asleep, but then the succession of weird dreams i've been having over the last month or so hasn't always been particularly logical and probably suggests that i need to find a job.  Fast.. 

Reportback from The 4th Annual Siren Music Festival:  The Fiery Furnaces and TV On The Radio were both great.  (And i was happy when the PA system played The Specials' "Ghost Town" right before the TV on the Radio set.)  Mission of Burma was fantastic.  They actually managed to play "That's When I Reach For My Revolver" second to last and not have the last song be anticlimactic.  And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead were drunk and out of tune and their stage antics stopped being amusing after a certain point.  Kinda wish i could have checked out the Blonde Redhead set, but it conflicted with Mission of Burma.  The songs they did well were great, and when the drummer climbed up on the speaker and jumped back on to the stage, that was pretty amazing.  But how many shows can you do until smashing your guitars after every set becomes routine?  ("Every gimmick-hungry yob digging gold from rock and roll grabs the mic to tell us he'll die before he's sold, But I believe in this-and it’s been tested by research - that he who fucks nuns will later join the church." - The Clash, of course)   Course, when the PA system started playing Gang of Four's "Natural's Not In It" right before the trail of dead set, that made me very happy.  Besides repeating the line from which this blog takes it's name, messrs King and Gill opine

Natural is not in it

Your relations are of power

We all have good intentions

But all with strings attached

Yeah, i know, there's something very dorky about liking a PA song more than an actual band.  And in the scheme of things, Trail of Dead weren't terrible, just kind of dissapointing.  Although much-hyped, Source Tags and Codes was a great album, and i'd heard great things about their live show from friends who'd seen them before.  And Mission of Burma were a tough act to follow (why the fuck weren't they headlining?)

More bizarre dreams last night - i was fratronizing with a magical tree woman and her two young tree children.  Yeah, i know, i need help. 

 

Today's Register reports on the effects of the NLRBush ruling for workers at Yale.  Tom Conroy celebrates Graduate Students return to the metaphorical plantation, claiming that the ruling

"restores graduate assistants to their historic status as primarily students," something the university believes "is best for the students and for the nation’s higher education system.

Mary Reynolds, Chair of GESO (the Register woefully misrepresents the effects of the union's organizing over the last decade, calling them unsuccessful and uncritically referencing the May 2003 election to claim that the union was "rejected because of its organizing methods") situates the ruling in the context of the Bushist assault on workers' rights and affirms that contrary to Conroy's jubiliant and offensive evocations of the imagery quelled rebellions ("restoration?"), the underlying causes which have led graduate teachers and researchers at private universities as well as public ones to organize themselves will not dissappear simply because the state has stripped away their right to organize.  Richard Hurd predicts that there won't be more new organizing drives until the NLRB is again controlled by a democratic majority.  This seems like movement suicide though.

Alright, that's enough for now.  I'm going to Coney Island to see some free music.

Weapons of Class Instruction V

 

I see this richard levin/he rules like chairman mao/he'll legislate you into oblivion/if you don't silently bow/with his friends on the labor board/he'll milk you like a cow/from the comfort of his luxury home (to the tune of ballad of a thin man)

I walked up to Columbia hoping to find someone wearing a GSEU pin with whom i could rant about the Bush regime's experiment in catastrophic nostalgia, but had no such luck.  So instead i sat on the steps i used to always sit on in hiughschool when feeling depressed and self absorbed and i thought about how the capitalists and the state crush and repress social movements, the site at which, some thirty six years ago, the New York Police Department brutally beat students protesting Columbia's gentrification tactics in Morningside Heights and in the scientific and research apparatus fueling the Indochina wars and the development of new tactics of state repression in the turbid streets of America's racialized urban spaces being, of course, a prime location for such thoughts.  The decision means that elections at not only Brown University, but also Columbia, Penn, and Tufts will probably be thrown out.  This excellent Steve Greenhouse-Karen Arenson article asserts that even the already recognized union at NYU is now in danger of dissolution should the administration simply refuse to bargain after the current contract ends.  Phil Wheeler's comments are heartening, and i doubt that this is the end for the academic labor movement, both because of the sheer partisanship of this decision and because GESO, for one, was organizing for a decade prior to the NYU decision, (and TA Solidarity existed three years prior, and the aforementioned TAO activity was scaring provosts left and right by January of 1972) and no matter how "magnificent" the Sheldon Steinbachs and Richard Levins and Ruth Simmonses and Lee Bollingers and Judith Rodins may be feeling right now, i hope that GESO and GSEU and GET-UP and GSOC's members keep fighting for the vision of the university that we built in the streets fourteen months ago, because it's too important to let a bunch of fascists destroy it. 

Just lemme know where to stand during the mass arrest.  Or who ya want me to organize.

THE REPUBLICAN-STACKED NRLB COMPLETELY THROWS OUT A FOUR YEAR OLD PRECEDENT, GRADUATE STUDENTS' WORK NO LONGER "ECONOMIC" (Making Levin. and Bollinger, and Rodin, etc, very very happy, i'm sure)

 

So much for the NYU decision - or the much quoted sentiment that the current republican regime is all 80's retro.  These motherfuckers seem intent on taking us back to the 1970s...

 

This is a shameful little chapter in American labor history, though not entirely unexpected, given the Bush administration's stacking of the NRLB with anti-worker, pro-business capitalists intent on limiting who can speak to power and on legislating workers' voices out of existence.  But if they want to take this back to the 1970s, we need to remember the 70's as a crucial moment in the hsitory of the current academic labor movement - when some of the first unions of teaching assistants at public universities won recognition, and when Yale's own TAs began their first organizing drive (scroll way down).  Weapons of Class Instruction are not so easily disarmed.

 

I stand in solidarity with GSEU, GESO, and all of the other sisters and brothers whom the NLRB is trying to legislate into academic thralldom in fighting for a more just vision of what universities can look like and of the way education works.  More on this later.

I've been having a series of pronounced and pronouncedly weird dreams since graduating from school.  Usually i can only remember my dreams when i'm particularly stressed out.  But over the last month and a half (more actually, what a colossal waste of life) I've had pretty memorable dreams almost every night.

 

The one that just ended was about an email - one which  someone never wrote.  I could visualize the actual text.  I dreamed not only the fact of the email, but its contents as well, down to the last word, though they are currently evacuating my memory and were they not i would still have little desire to post them on the internet.  Reading the letter was sort of a bittersweet experience, but realizing that it had never been written, in a cold jolt back to waking reality, was really sad.

This NYT article actually makes Rell's adventures in Babykissing look heroic.  I'm not so convinced.

Wait.  You mean i can post in red now?  Rock on!

 

Well, i'm doing pretty good today.  Actually left the apartment for more than the customary-and-not-particularly-psychically-healthy, given its historical resonances and the whole "tracing the contours of the gentriied strip mall amusement park city" thing,-walk up to Columbia and back, meeting Vic in union square, eating really, really cheap Sushi ($2.12 per avocado roll!!!) and then we hung out in Brooklyn (where Vic is living) for a while before i got back on the train and wound up bumping into a friend from college and his brother in the 42nd street subway station.  Still digging through the excellent new Davila book.  I'm a little more than halfway through.  Most of my reading has been done sitting on benches in Strauss park in the middle of my walks.  The upper west side's gentrification, having metastasized and entered progessively more advanced stages over the last decade and a half or so, with the omnipresence of chain drugstores, banks, tanning salons and luxury clothiers, is in a very different place from that of neighborhoods like El Barrio, Loisada, or many areas of Brooklyn.  but it's worth remembering that thirty, forty years ago, swathes of the west side were working class ethnic neighborhoods, destroyed by development schemes (like Lincoln Center) and by rent increases and property speculation.  I need to go back and read more of Christopher Mele's excellent work on the Lower East Side, but i think what i'm trying to get at with this is like a historical view of the shit i've seen happening in this neighborhood ever since Barnes and Noble destroyed the Shakespeare and Company store (featured prominently, by the way, in When Harry Met Sally - it's where they meet for the third time.)  Since i was old enough to articulate any kind of critique of these processes, i've been calling it a regentrification, or, more properly, a post-gentrification - already gentrified space becomes even more corporatized and privatized.  But i'm not certain that this analysis really describes the complexities of the situation.  If anyone has any thoughts, please post comments.

Alyssa's meditation on yesterday's defeat in the senate of an effort to legislate homophobia into the U.S. constitution offers a stark indictment of the democratic party's failure to pursue an agenda in any way related to sexual and social justice, which, she convincingly argues, makes the democrats complicit in what Kushner calls the murderous agenda of the religious right and the Catholic church in blasting the conservative leadership of organizations like the Human Rights Campaign.  Alyssa's piece insightfully picks apart and levels righteous and rightful wrath at the cynical and marginalizing tactics of the supposedly progressive half of the aisle.

And it's BACK TO THE DRAWING BOARD on the job front!



crap.

I went to sleep at around 2AM, which is roughly normal fro me since moving back to New York. I woke up at 11:30 feeling exhausted, and my innards still feel, well, like somebody fucked them up with a rubber tube. And i'd really rather be somewhere else than sitting in front of my computer screen trying to assure myself that the pangs in my chest are only hunger and trying not to think about what to wear to or say at this meeting tonight or about grad school or about my frustration with being 23 years old and living in a room i haven't lived in since i was 19. (Not including the months i spent here when i was working with local 100 the summer i turned 21.) Or why my credit card didn't go through at the music store yesterday. Or where i go to look for work if this thing falls through.



Fuck Rick Santorum. Or actually, don't fuck Rick Santorum. But you get my drift.

With the exception ofthe stuff clearly engineered as kitsch before it was even released (Spice Girls, Backstreet Boys, etc) the 1990s don't seem to be a very kitschy decade. Perhaps this is why VH1 has seen fit to distort its historical narrative by inexplicably placing "Where's Waldo" in 1993.



A little background. To paraphrase Sam Jackson's Jules in Pulp Fiction, I was the waldo fucking master. I found waldo. I found all the scrolls. I found all the sadistic funny shit. And i could do it again today. Problem is, i did this all the year i moved to New York from Pennsylvania. That was 1989. I don't believe that there were any Waldo books published after 1990 or so. So why periodize them as part of the '93 moment? Because you can't find anything funny to say about Onyx's Bacdafucup, ATCQ's Midnight Marauders, or Liz Phair's Exile in Guyville?



God, i am such a dork.



Somebody hire me!

Well, i survived down the tube down the esophagus, and while the anaesthetization process kind of sucked, i guess i should be glad they did it down the throat and not somewhere even more invasive. I can look forward to that when i'm fiftysomething and need a colonoscopy, i guess. After the procedure i got some lunch with my dad, and then tried to appease my bruised ego by buying a couple cds the unicorns' who will cut our hair when we're gone, the devendra barnhardt cd that's all over the place, and the new fiery furnaces cd. Geberally more trendy than the direrction my tastes tend to lean, but they're all supposed to be good, so i'm looking forward to listening to them.

Metablog

I've been getting a suprising number of search hits concerning the dentyne fire commerical post a couple weeks ago. In a way, i regret this, because i think my analysis of marketable ethnicity could have been stronger and more nuanced. Hopefully Arlene Davila's new book Barrio Dreams, which i'm currently reading, will help me with some more precise and insightfuk analyses to bring to the commercial as text.



In other news, my post last night about When Harry Met Sally has met with concern from both Alyssa and Erin, who have more fond estimations of the film's sincerity than i. (Meanwhile, my mom also reads my blog, and teases me about this.) In truth, maybe WHMS needs to be read on a more abstract criterion than that on which i have attempted to judge it. I stand firm (and toned.. hehehe) to my assertion that Ephron's tale is deeply cynical at its core about human need and desire - alot like the end of High Fidelity, but less quirkily romantic and realistic and more abjectly hopeless. Nevertheless, When Harry Met Sally - and the imitators it spawned need to be read as a genre on the level of cultural productiona nd the cultural politics they espouse, enact, and perform.



Say Anything is a great, great movie. Except for the fucking Peter Gabriel song.

Alright, because you didn't ask, here are

PRELIMINARY REFLECTIONS ON VH1's I LOVE THE 90s



Them making fun of the silly commercial shit doesn't piss me off that much. It's their attempts to include "the underground," the "alternative" in their narrative of commercial nostalgia. I suppose i should have been ready for this after living through the damn decade and being here for the exploitation and destruction of at least one genre of music. But still, and without meaning to be puritanical or pretentious or essentialist, what the FUCK is Liz Phair doing? Yeah, great, sure, give the Pixies lip service but isn't the woman who wrote Exile In Guyville a talented enough artist not to have to appear on crappy tv shows with michael fucking bolton? And what does it mean for the Pixies anyway if they get less airtime than... JC Chasez's ruminations on the slap bracelet? Just a thought. Return of Jason Mewes is kind of not that intolerable though. And i'm sure Marc Lanegan, the lead singer of the screaming trees, will appreciate Dee Sinder's words of praise. More as the indignation moves me...

Like we needed this letter to see Joyce's sexual side? Has this reporter ever actually read Ulysses? It's the raunchiest book i've ever read. Including all the stolen porn my friends used to stash at my house in grade school so their catholic parenst wouldn't find it.

Tomorrow afternoon a GI doctor will dope me up and then shove a tube down my esophagus and into my stomach to attempt to discover the cause of my involuntary regurgitation of undigested food (not as vomit - still tastes the same coming up as it did going down. Thank goodness for small favors.) I am not particularly looking forward to this.

I just watched "When Harry Met Sally" on the television. Amidst the heartbreak of my melodramatic post-girlfriend melancholia in high school, and all those New Yearsses without the kiss-commodity, i remember finding that movie touching. Now it strikes me as profoundly cynical, which, i suppose, is basically Nora Ephron's modus operandi. I don't know what Ephron looks like. For some reason i always imagine her as the twin of former SNL comedienne Nora Dunn. Oh wait, it's cause they're both named Nora. I have never faked an orgasm. Nor do i necessarily think i woudl have ordered what she did. Soemone found my old blog bu searching for Erin Scharff, which is a little weird. Hope it wasn't a stalker. The search for "Hazel Carby and Michael Denning" strikes me as even weirder though, unless it was their son or something. I mean, who would search for them together unless you were trying to discover the minutiae of their personal life online?



Is love a patriarchical construction of desire and power and need written on womens' bodies and psyches or is there something more to it beyond even the horrible silences which Ephron and Reiner's sappy sentimentalism masks. And why the fuck do i like romantic comedies so much? Particularly ones with John Cusack in them? Two Cusacks? Even better!



Good night.

The huge post i lost yesterday was, among other things, an extended meditation on the construction of the family and the historical and ideological formation of the categorization "American Jews," prompted both by me turning 23 and feeling like i should be more of an adult than i presently feel like i am, living here as a non-paying tenant in my old room in my parents' apartment, and by comments by an israewli minister which i overheard on national public radio regarding the Hague's ruling on the wall, which greatly disturbed me. I won't try to rehash the entry here, because it was very long and went in to an in-depth exploration of the tensions between socialist/anarchist internationalism and white privilege in my family's history as a way of describing some tof the tensions underlying the formation of this category and my tenuous relationship to it, but i'm a little excited to have found the words to talk about feelings of exclusion and contingency that have been haunting me since 7th grade and possibly before in ways which aren't vitiative or accusatory.



I don't think this statement:

"Time will tell how effective this is. However, it does reinforce the reality that the traditional benefits of the union movement are no longer appealing to workers."

by Randel Johnson, VP for labor, immigration, and employee benefits at the US Chamber of Commerce, is at all uselful. If some of the traditional methods and languages of union organizing have been rendered obsolete by the influx of new workers from the global south, and i'm not entirely sure this is the case - it seems more that many unions have forgotten how to organize immigrant workers, tactics which built the labor movement between the 8 hour movement of the 1880s and the first world war, and then again during the 1930s. Moreover, Johnson strategically elides the systematic destruction of workers' right to organize by corporations and their political allies, which has been responsible for sweeping changes to the workplace, and, specifically to workers' ability to excercise a voice in the means and conditions of the work that they do.



On a more personal note, i miss my friends. With the exception of Alyssa, Vic, and Austin, i haven't seen any of them in months and i'm feeling very isolated and frustrated and lonely.



EDIT: Thanks to Erin for recommending this fantastic piece in the nation by Esther Kaplan, which asks and answers a lot of the questions i was trying to grapple with.

i just lost a huge post. And i spilled diet pepsi on my keyboard. Crap.

Today being my 23rd birthday, for which i am doing very little in celebration due to mild depression and general lack of contact with the world outside my parents' apartment, i thought it might be appropriate to initiate my first substantiative post here in quite some time. I'm feeling, as i noted above pretty depressed and lonely, and reading "Retort's" (post)situationist look at the politics of spectacle and what David White so arrogantly termed the world of September 11th people in the most recent New Left Review has perhaps introduced a meditation on the politics of boredom, work and joblessness, privilege, and, yes, spectacle, to my frustrations.



I have what may or may not be an interview for what may or may not be a paying job on wednesday. the organization in question is a workers' center for taxi drivers in new york city. I am hoping it works out.



Wandering broadway today (after lunch with my dad i walked four miles by myself) i saw the person from my high school class whom i used to (somewhat) jokingly describe as my "nemesis." I recognized his face, which still elicits this shock of revulsion and anger from me from all the terrible things i associated him with in high school and all of my fears that i was or would become just like him. He didn't see me, and i was on a line buying an italian ice from the window of the beauty product outlet which replaced the torn-down Shalespeare and Co. Bookstore on 81st Street and Broadway like nine or ten years ago. I don't knwo what we would have said to eachother had he seen me, but i'm sure it would in some way involve my being defensive and ashamed of being unemployed, 23, and living with my parents. It occurs to me that i haven't hung out with any friends in weeks. And it occurs to me that it is both obnoxious and innappropriate to try to elicit sympathy from an imagined public via a blog entry, so i'll cease discussining my Marcusian estrangement from an imagined humanity here and turn elsewhere. By the way, NPR sucks shit. Particularly when the Jefferson experts offer apologia for slavery and Charles Hill and David Brooks constitute authoritative speech while Brian Lehrer responds to GESO veteran Corey Robin's (and yes, i do think it's pretty cool that he was on the radio in the first place) observations about rethinking the Cold War and the Reagan Era with a few brief and dismissive observations. (I also wish Robin had used the more damning anecdote regarding Reagan's meeting with the murderous Guatemalan dictator Erain Rios Montt in 1982, in which the U.S. President referred to the protestant dictator with strong connections to the Norteamericano religious right whose government had initiating sweeping death squad assassination tactics against students, workers, organizers, and indigenous peasants, killing some 15,000 people in the span of a few brief months, as "totally dedicated to democracy" and as haven been "given a bum rap by the press." The same press, of course, whose ranks the death squads were purging.

i need a god damned job

i need a god damned job

i need a god damned job

i need a god damned job

god damn it

god damn it

god damn

i need a god damned job

-the replacements