I broke my fast with some Ollies Steamed Vegetable Dumplings and a quart, yes, a quart, of pumkin pie tasti-d-lite. Yom Kippur was somewhat unsuccesful for me this year. Instead of revaluating my life and my interactions with other people, all i could really concentrate on, besides being really, really hungry, was how much shit i need to do between now and tomorrow morning. Well, that and sex. And (i cannot tell a lie,) the ewok subaltern, the imperial politics of translation and gold-plated technomagical subjugation, and the imperial politics by which the film's sound engineer, Ben Burtt, created the ewok language through the appropriation and imitation of peasant languages of central China. The process by which Burtt collects "exotic" sounds, ascribing to subhuman aliens the tongues of the wallersteinian global periphery to pepper the sonic canvas upon which George Lucas's tale of pulp fantasy rebellion is inscribed, is thus problematic, to say the least. Now that i've eaten, i really need to start cleaning my room and packing my shit up, so this is probably going to be it for posting for a while.



Hard to believe it's been two years since this.



Addendum: songs of the day.

The Go-Betweens: "Spring Rain"

Sleater-Kinney, "A Quarter To Three"

Augustus Pablo: "East Of The River Nile"

The Replacements: "Skyway"

Husker Du: "Sorry Somehow"

First a little commodity fetishism: I just got The Arcade Fire's debut full-legnth, Funeral, in the mail, and it deserves all the hype it's been getting on pitchfork and elsewhere. I also finally found my copies of the score and The Grey Album (they were on the floor behind my computer,) about which i don't have anything insightful to say other than that "Family Business" and "Zealots" are great songs and that DM's version of "Change Clothes," recut with George Harrison's "Piggies" is about ten million times better than the original. I'm pretty excited about the release this coming tuesday of both Interpol's second LP, Antics, and Talib Kweli's second solo album (and third full legnth since Mos Def and Talib Kweli Are Black Star), The Beatiful Struggle. But what i'm even more excited/worried about is the news, via pitchfork yesterday that Mos Def himself, whose verse on "Respiration" is classic and whose solo debut was absolutely incredible is going to release his long awaited second solo album, New Danger, a mere five years after Black On Both Sides. Some argue that Mos Def has lost it since 1999, as evinced by a somewhat spotty series of singles and compilation tracks - although he still managed to upstage Kweli with the best single verse on Train of Thought, "This Means You"'s meditation on the racialized geography of post-Giuliani New York. Anyway, Alek be damned! (And i even kind of liked Brown Sugar.) I'm excited by this news and psyched to hear this record.



I've been wallowing in Pre-K nostalgia with the release of the star-wars trilogy on dvd and remebering afternoons spent in David Beckman's den in Pennsylvania watching the opening scenes of jedi over and over again and comparing his bearded collie, Sammy, to falco the luck dragon in Wolfgang Petersen's film of the Michael Ende novel, The Neverending Story. I could write a long cultural studies-inflected essay about all the problems inherent in having the bad aliens speak a language based on Quetchua, or about Ewoks as Zerzanian primitivist revolutionaries paradoxically enamored with the promise of capitalism, technology, and robot gods with british accents, but i have too much other stuff i ought to be doing instead.



I'm flying out to San Francisco on Sunday for a training for the job, then moving to Boston for at least the next two and a half months. Meanwhile, the world is ending with a bang, Allawi is stumping for Bush as the heads roll, and Rumsfeld and the state department are feuding over how many people in their second most recent colonial acquisition (i haven't forgotten Haiti even if they have) will get to vote in the uppcoming sham of an election.



Kind of makes one want to move to mexico for a year. But everyone else i know already thought of that, and then they al wind up in DC anyway. Time to go for a walk and do some atoning.

as if you needed more reasons to hate wal-mart

In which the securitized state takes a wild ride

Are we really supposed to believe that Cat Stevens is a national security risk?



Meanwhile, and much more importantly, an iraqi woman among those detained at Abu Ghraib by American Occupation forces speaks out about the abuses she was forced to endure.

Alazawi says that American guards then made her stand with her face against the wall for 12 hours, from noon until midnight. Afterwards they returned her to her cell. "The cell had no ceiling. It was raining. At midnight they threw something at my sister's feet. It was my brother Ayad. He was bleeding from his legs, knees and forehead. I told my sister: 'Find out if he's still breathing.' She said: 'No. Nothing.' I started crying. The next day they took away his body."

The US military later issued a death certificate, seen by the Guardian, citing the cause of death as "cardiac arrest of unknown etiology". The American doctor who signed the certificate did not print his name, and his signature is illegible. The body was returned to the family four months later, on April 3, after the Abu Ghraib torture scandal broke. The family took photographs of the body, also seen by the Guardian, which revealed extensive bruising to the chest and arms, and a severe head wound above the left eye.

After Ayad's body had been taken away, Alazawi says that she and 18 other Iraqi detainees were put in a minibus inside the military compound. "The Americans told us: 'Nobody is going to sleep tonight.' They played scary music continuously with loud voices. As soon as someone fell asleep they started beating on the door. It was Christmas. They kept us there for three days. Many of the US soldiers were drunk."

Finally, after a US guard broke her shoulder as she left the lavatory, Alazawi and her surviving siblings were transferred - first to a police academy in Baghdad's interior ministry and then, on January 4 2004, to Abu Ghraib prison.

HOW THE FUCK DID I NOT KNOW ABOUT THIS?

Today's tracks, in honor of Lauryn Hill's return to humanity, are as follows



1.The Fugees, "Cowboys,"

2.Mos Def, "Mathematics"

3.Reflection Eternal ft. Mos Def, "This Means You"

4.The Fugees, "Fu-gee-la"

5.Lauryn Hill, "Everything is Everything"

6.Common, "The Sixth Sense."

14 minutes and 34 seconds of wistful bliss

...without any Robert Smith!



1.The Clash, "Janie Jones." I think it's wistful. Argue at your own peril.

2.Sleater-Kinney, "Dance Song '97." This song is one of my all time favorites.

3.The Ramones, "Needles & Pins"

4.Charles Mingus, "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat" (of course.)

5.Iron & Wine, "Naked As We Came."



Of course, i could just post the tracklist from the wrens' "meadowlands," which rocks my world.

holy shit, i'm employed

Barring unforseen friction or my premature demise, i'm pretty sure i just got a union job in Boston starting september 27. I've been unemployed for four months now, so the whole thing feels a little surreal, and i'm really nervous about going to a city i don't know where no one i know lives to do hard, challenging work, while simultaneously attempting to apply to graduate school. But i'm also excited to be doing this kind of work again on a really exciting campaign, and leaving my parents' apartment, and getting paid. In honor of me finding a job, today's songs are all work or union related.



Dead Prez, "w-4"

Kanye West, "Spaceship"

Ralph Chaplin (and Local 34,) "Solidarity Forever"

Dr. Dre featuring Alyssa Rosenberg and Eminem, "Forgot About Pay"

Eric B. and Rakim, "Paid In Full"

alternate: Franz Ferdinand, "Jacqueline"

This woman is not a heckler. She's a rock star.

HAMILTON, New Jersey (CNN) -- The mother of a soldier killed in Iraq was arrested Thursday in Hamilton, New Jersey, after interrupting a campaign speech by first lady Laura Bush. As police hauled her away, she shouted, "Police brutality."

Wearing a T-shirt with the message "President Bush You Killed My Son," Sue Niederer of nearby Hopewell screamed questions at the first lady as the audience tried to drown her out by chanting, "Four more years! Four more years!"

She pressed on, refused to leave and eventually police removed her from the firehouse rally.

Happy Mexican Independence Day!

Today's songs of the day:

The Ramones: "Bonzo Goes To Bitburg"

Pavement: "...And Carrot Rope"

Albert King: "Personal Manager"

The Breeders: "Drivin' On 9"

The Wowz: "See You In The Paper"

Via Nathan Newman's Laborblog, the bush NRLB does it again!

Disabled workers in a vocational program who are paid for providing janitorial services and work alongside nondisabled workers are not employees covered by federal labor law, the National Labor Relations Board ruled 3-2 (Brevard Achievement Ctr. Inc., 342 N.L.R.B. No. 101, 9/10/04 [released 9/15/04]).

A board majority consisting of Chairman Robert J. Battista and Members Peter C. Schaumber and Ronald Meisburg found that the disabled workers' relationship with the nonprofit Brevard Achievement Center Inc. is "primarily rehabilitative" and not economic. "Although the disabled clients work the same hours, receive the same wages and benefits, and perform the same tasks under the same supervision as the nondisabled employees, they work at their own pace, and performance problems are dealt with through additional training rather than discipline," the majority said.

The board overturned a regional director's July 2000 decision allowing the disabled workers to vote in a representation election to determine whether the Transport Workers Union would represent a unit of janitors, custodians, and leadpersons working for Brevard. It is unclear whether the union will still seek an election for a unit that excludes the disabled workers.

Dissenting, Members Wilma B. Liebman and Dennis P. Walsh asserted that the disabled workers "easily meet" the National Labor Relations Act's broad definition of employee. Citing federal law and policy designed to provide equal opportunity to disabled persons, the two members urged their colleagues to "abandon doctrines that were based on outdated notions about the place of the disabled in society" and to end "the needless segregation of those workers."

Johnny Ramone, RIP

Surfer Rosa clarified, Levin hagiographed

Surfer Rosa is an absolutely brilliant album. The first seven tracks, from "Bone Machine" through "Where is My Mind," are among the best the band wrote and constitute some of the most important music recorded in the last two and a half decades. "Tony's Theme," the reworked "Vamos," and "Brick Is Red" merit similiar accolades. But some of the album's other tracks, while they would have stolen the show on bossanova or trompe le monde, have always failed to hold my attention in the context of Surfer Rosa's more rigorous standards of experimentation and songwriting than the Pixies' bland third LP or their hit-or-miss finale. I think specifically i'm talking about "Cactus" and "I'm Amazed" (minus the Kim Deal high school scandal monologue) more than i'm talking about "Oh My Golly." Doolittle doesn't do this. It's absolutely perfect, a bizarre and occasionally psychotic pop masterpiece . And i don't buy the argument that Surfer Rosa is somehow "more experimental," than its predecessor as a number of friends whose musicality and musicianship i respect tremendously have recently alleged. On the dirge-funk of "Hey," the plaintive, surreal slide guitar jangle of "Silver," the one-two punch of the reggae-inflected "Mr. Grieves" and the the frenzied "Crackity Jones," not to mention "La La Love You"'s unique admixture of biting satire and heartfealt saccharine goo, Doolittle transversed frontiers which Surfer Rosa had barely dreamt of.



This is a solid YDN article stressing the importance of a continued activist stance on Levin's part for academic visa reform. It's right, and it's actually timely, which, for the YDN, is quite a stretch - usually they back things after the federation wins them - although, of course, that is partially what is happening here, but it also conveniently ignores the fact that this issue wouldn't even be on Levin's radar if international students hadn't organized and fought to put it there. Face it YDN, the Federation of Hospital and University Employees is the future of the academy, and it's a future worth fighting for.

and a hearty l'shanah tovah to all di yidn out there

shit, i wish i could give myself a raise. I mean, i'm all for COLA increases, but do elected officials making six figures really need to worry about their cost of living? How the hell can they justify this shit at the same time that Bush wants to raise medicare premiums and their costly imperial venture in iraq is racking up the defecits and body counts?

it's educational

Spin Magazine, otherwise generally mediocre (they gave Blueberry Boat a fucking C(?)), has an extensive interview with the Pixies which isn't half bad. I'm one of the people who never got to see the pixies live, but on whom they had a tremendous influence. Doolittle's bizarre, biblical brilliance warped my fragile little mind in the summer between 8th and 9th grade and continues to amaze me every time i listen to it despite the fact that i have every note on the album pretty much memorized. And i don't care what you say, as great as surfer rosa is, it just doesn't have the same effect on me. Except when Kim does the whole "this is a song about a superhero named tony. It's called Tony's theme" thing. That gives me goosebumps. Like "chickenbutt" goosebumps. Well, almost. I'm psyched for when they hit NY.



This article from the chronicle of higher education is deeply frightening.

Washington -- Following a recommendation of the commission that investigated

the 2001 terrorist attacks, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has

decided to give the Federal Bureau of Investigation direct access to its

databases for tracking foreign visitors, including students and scholars.



The decision, announced quietly on Tuesday in a revision to the department's

privacy policy, means that bureau agents will no longer have to ask the

department for information from the Student and Exchange Visitor Information

System, known as Sevis, and the U.S. Visitor and Immigration Status

Indication Technology System, known as U.S. Visit. Sevis is a database that

the department uses to track foreign students. U.S. Visit contains biometric

data that are used to identify visitors at the border.



A spokeswoman for the department said that the change would help the FBI to

investigate criminals and terrorists. She said built-in safeguards,

including periodic audits of the system, would ensure that any information

gleaned from the databases would be used strictly to enforce laws. Students

and scholars who thought that their personal information was being misused

could write to the department's security officer, she said.

Besides confirming the fascist impulses behind the construction of the homeland, this highlights the neexd for collective organizations of graduate student employees to organize at both the university and federal level to fight for the rights of immigrant workers, students, and scholars and for a new and better vision of an academy and workplace in which someone's last name or country of origin does not become fodder for federal racial profiling in the policing of the homeland security state.



Yesterday's regional geso-lover blogger encuentro was fun. Good to see folks. apologies for killing the conversation with the whole pregnant 11 year old thing. Being in New Haven after three and a half months of not being in new haven was odd and i spent a great deal of energy trying to avoid the central campus so as to not draw attention to myself. But it was good to see Josh, Phoebe, Alyssa, Honorable Benjamin Goldman Healey, Marissa, Helena, Rebecca, lots of UOC people i don't know (rock!), Geso, and Schnabels. (And i'm glad tiburon's alive, well, and getting fat.) It was worth missing the last train out of New Haven to see Thomas, Kevin, and Lauren, and once again many thanks to Lauren and Julie for letting me crash on their futon and eat their rice.



Songs of the day:

Le Tigre - "My, my metrocard"

Pixies - "Tony's Theme"

Mission of Burma - "This is Not a Photograph"

Sleater-Kinney - "one beat"

While i sympathize with Evan's rejection of the fetishization of September 11th and his call to move on to September 12, i do feel traumatized by what happened. I feel traumatized when i see the video images of huge clouds of toxic debris sweeping up into the sky and uptown, enshrouding church street and sixth avenue and varick and west broadway and probably my old guitar teacher Jerry's ex girlfriend's loft on franklin in a pompeii-like shroud of death. The photographs of people jumping to their deaths make me think of the triangle shirtwaist fire and they make me think of my brother's friends' parents and my parents' friends who didn't make it out. And i think about the 43 members of local 100 and all the people standing on the street with photographs of the dead. And then i think about that early footage of Giuliani, eschewing grief for a cry for war, his enemy, the "barbarians," already clearly demarcated. I think about how quickly he was to urge new yorkers to channel trauma and grief into hatred and vengeance. We rightly accused bush and the RNC of hijacking our collective trauma when they brought their convention, with its seemingly infinite detentions and frenzied police state of a city, to a new york still bearing the scars, as axl would say, of their civil wars. But upon seeing all that early press conference footage of Giuliani, seeing his speeches in the days just after, it occurs to me once again that the the real hijacking here began much, much earlier.



And of course September 11 makes me think of 1973 as well as 2001, of los desaparecidos and henry kissenger, of salvador allende and milton friedman. of roosting chickens and the international monetary fund and donald duck,ariel dorfman, and victor jara, soccer stadiums and torture chambers and the university of chicago.



Three years ago, i was in new haven, writing a reading response for michael denning and patricia pessar's ERM Intro seminar. I was walking through durfee's sweet shop when i saw the images on the television screen. The rest of the day was surreal. On september 14, i hopped on a metro north to go visit my parents for a few hours, make sure they were still there, etc. The city felt quiet. It felt dead. It still does.

anyone else think it's ironic that there's an assault rifle called a Bushmaster?

reading this makes me feel liberated. The Red Cross rides the coattails of empire, cleaning up after the armies and the occupiers and offering meager consolation to the stateless , homeless, or those who've lost loved ones - and the bush administration won't even let them in on how many prisoners they're hiding in dungeons. I feel like terms such as "ghost detainees" or "unregistered detainees" don't really begin to address the scope and horrific nature of how the imperial management of bodies is playing itself out in this little opera of state formation and racialized brutality.

Vin Petrini's newest spin tactic, claiming that 1199 has ignored "larger trends" in favor of leveraging vicious attacks against an underserving YNHH, is nearly as silly as it is arrogant. The success of the hospital campaign thus far in leveraging pressure on hospital management and forcing serious structural change in debt collection practices has occurred precisely because researchers, organizers, workers, and debtors have powerfully demonstrated the ways in which tax-deductible, ostensibly non-profit hospitals like Yale have profited enormously from exploiting the declining availability and icreasing costs of health care for working people and the unemployed poor. The movement has achieved stunning successes against and intransigent and imperious opponent precisely because it has looked at health care structurally. Petrini, who doesn't even know when his workers are on strike, seems to be talking out his ass once again.

just think - what could happen if Bush and co. don't renew the assault weapons ban...



(puppy power.)

Jennifer Gonnerman on life in New York's "Li'l Gitmo" and the politics of indefinite detention

"Something happened here I thought would never happen," Arrington says. "You expect it in the former Soviet Union, or Saudi Arabia maybe. But New York City? It's like they took the Bill of Rights and threw it in the trash can. To be arrested for standing on a sidewalk for disorderly conduct? It's beyond ridiculous. It violates people's rights. I'd have never believed it if you told me this would happen in the middle of New York City."

...In this crowd, it was easy to spot those who had been in jail. They were the ones whose T-shirts had filthy backs. The floor at Pier 57 had been covered with soot and grease droppings from the buses that used to park there. Some protesters spent the entire night at Pier 57. Anyone who tried to sleep was left with a dirty back. Sebastian Licht from Connecticut had removed his sandals and knelt on the ground. Now he had bandages on both feet. On the tops of them, he said, he'd gotten chemical burns. (Later in the week, after numerous complaints, city officials did put down carpets at Pier 57.)

One released detainee offers a personal account of over 40 hours in Pier 57, the "Guantanamo on the Hudson" and the Tombs of central booking.



Another arrestee offers a videotaped testimony here



I, meanwhile, have been trying to post this entry for over 24 hours, but blogger seems to have been otherwise inclined, which makes me miss my old dependable html geocities site.

musical effluvia

First off, Happy Birthday to my dad, who turns 56 today.



The Wowz have released their debut LP, Long Grain Rights, on Chris Maher's Recommended If You Like Records. It's an excellent record, far stronger than their Nicotine Bubblegum EP and well worth buying. The newer material in particular is fantastic,a and this band is only getting better. You can get the CD from RIYL. I, however, got my copy at Kim's Uptown while inquiring about employment possibilities. I also found a used copy of the new Bad Religion album, The Empire Strikes First, which i'd been hearing good things about and had been wanting to check out for a while, mostly because the title rocks. And if that weren't enough, i found a used copy of Springsteen's Darkness on The Edge of Town, which is exciting 'cause i own no Springsteen at all and i've heard good things.

An interesting article from the Troy (NY) Record about unions and hip hop.

The Capital District Labor Foundation decided to help put the

event together after a group of young organizers approached members and spoke of

the need to mobilize younger people and suggested using hip-hop as a tool to get

their attention, said outreach coordinator Prairie Wells of Albany."Both

movements are rooted in collective action, in speaking the truth no matter what

the cost. Both movements have lost leaders to violence, to people trying to

silence us," Wells said, describing society-wide change and inclusionism as

other positive aspects of the movements.

here we go again

I got myself into this one, i know.

I like it here at Yale, where I can treat school as my own personal political playground and never pay any serious consequences! Yale has all the ingredients. An oppressed working class and an evil, capitalist stooge aristocracy running the show. Boy! Down with the capitalist robber barons and their imperialist-racialist-genderist-heterosexualist conceptions of society!

I could point out that Jamie treats political conventions at which psychotic fascists espouse homophobic constructions of citizenship and celebrate imperial warfare while hurling metaphoric spitballs at the men and women who actually get roped into waging it as his own playground, for while I (gasp) share his conviction that such events are “political theater,” I ascribe a great deal of significance to the ways in which such pageants construct and define nation, progress, and enemy, whereas Jamie seems more interested in following Jesse Jackson around and hobnobbing with famous people. Kirchick’s ridicule, directed at the notion that campus activism has any validity, and envisioning Yale as political playground (and I think the neo-(and paleo-)conservatives have always been more guilty of this than activists and organizers affiliated with the global justice movement) suggests his own parochial understanding of the political and cultural economy of higher education and the impact which an 11 billion dollar corporation makes upon global capital. The student labor movements, like other nodes of the networks which constitute the global justice movements, have always understood not only the privilege we enjoy as students at universities which must at least, unlike the secret service, pay lip service to freedom of speech, open debate, and academic freedom, but how we can target universities as nodes of capital and spaces at which it is both produced and reproduced, linking campus struggles with those affecting the communities around them, and, as in Yale’s case, the consequences of yale’s 3.5 billion dollar investement in an 8 billion dollar hedge fund in the business of employing IMF-mandated structural adjustment programs to hijack economies from Indonesia to Argentina to southern Colorado. No one has ever made the argument that student organizing should be solely focused on campus, nor have any of us limited ourselves to such a focus in practice. It should come as little surprise that Kirchick does the social movement many of us have spent years working with in New Haven a disservice by consigning it to the playground. Try telling that to Scott Marks, Velma Williams, Andrea Cole, or Dale Lucas. The scorn which people like Jamie focus on the movements organized by the folks who clean their bathrooms, cook their food, care for them when they’ve consumed too much sherry or chardonnay, or teach their sections and grade their papers constitutes the real manifestation of privilege and exclusion here, and I’m glad I don’t have to deal with it anymore.

Right, because things like "Sexuality and Gender conceptions of the 16th Century Native American" are really adding to our body of knowledge.

Guess that depends on how you define "our."

but the sea will be boiling

Walking back from a screening of the powerful and provocative new Indymedia-produced film The Miami Model this afternoon, i passed the site of the Moon Ska Records office/storefront at 84 East 10th street. Since Moon shut down in December 2000, the storefront had been barren each time i passed by, but now a fancy yuppie japanese restaurant has moved in. marking the east village's continuing transformation into a commoditized, marketable spectacular image of punk boheme tenement chic. The republicans may be gone from New York (save City Hall, Albany, and wherever the fuck Rudy Giuliani and Judith Nathan are hiding,) but the militarization of the policing of urban spaces continues, concurrent with the continuing corporate expropriation and privatization of what Hardt and Negri term "the Common," and Manhattan's violent transfromation into a neoliberal amusement park for the wealthy and white. So i have little joy at being able to once again walk down Broadway relatively unimpeded by police nets, pepper spray, and nightstick-twirling kevlar-clad agents of state repression. What New York remains for us girlie-men? (And where are all the girlie-women - or in this republican nightmare of gender reversal are all leftist women evil beer-guzzling, hairy armpit, Le Tigre t-shirt wearing, sideburnt and mustachioed drag king dykes from hell?) And how can we create a new one from its ashes?

The Nation's Liza Featherstone on labor in the Bush years:

The Bush Administration might have enjoyed a champagne toast to another recent victory over workers, also engineered by its NLRB. In July the agency declared that graduate students do not have the right to organize and that under federal law they are not employees, thus abruptly reversing a legal precedent set by several earlier decisions. The decision fell sharply along party lines: The three judges voting for it were Republicans; the two dissenters were Democrats. Presidential hopeful John Kerry, meanwhile, has firmly opposed the Bush Administration on overtime as well as card check, even co-sponsoring the Employee Free Choice Act, which would require an employer to recognize a union when 50 percent of its workers sign cards. At present, recognition is up to the employer, so if enacted this bill would hugely improve workers' chances of organizing.

Uneventful night. Kind of sad for a friday. Ate two pints of tasti-d-lite and watched "save the last dance" on TNT. Don't tell anyone. I'll read a book tomorrow, i promise.

This is what democracy looks like?

Among the first published pictures of the Pier 57 "detention facility," courtesy of New York City Indymedia. I personally saw folks unjustly arrested during tuesday's brutal crackdown who were far too old and/or sick to be housed in such a facility, as many were, for over 24 hours. Shame on Mayor Bloomberg and shame on the NYPD for turning into the private security force of capitalist plutocrats intent on exploiting the city's trauma.

Quis Custodiet Custodies? Or, as KRS-ONE put it,

"You were put here to protect us

But who protects us from you?

Every time you say "That's illegal"

Doesn't mean that that's true (Uh huh)

Your authority's never questioned

No one questions you

If I hit you I'll be killed

But you hit me? I can sue (Order! Order!)

Lookin' through my history book

I've watched you as you grew

Killin' blacks and callin' it the law

(Bo! Bo! Bo!) And worshipping Jesus too

There was a time when a black man

Couldn't be down wit' your crew (Can I have a job please?)

Now you want all the help you can get

Scared? Well ain't that true (You goddamn right)

You were put here to protect us

But who protects us from you?

Or should I say, who are you protecting?

The rich? the poor? Who?

It seems that when you walk the ghetto

You walk wit' your own point of view (Look at that gold chain)

You judge a man by the car he drives

Or if his hat match his shoe (Yo, you lookin' kinda fresh)

Well, back in the days of Sherlock Holmes

A man was judged by a clue

Now he's judged by if he's Spanish,

Black, Italian or Jew"

best sign at the UFPJ vigil: "Restaurant Workers to RNC: We Spit In Your Food."



the vigil was beautiful and fun. Peaceful, chill, happy atmosphere was kind of a good antidote to the police state this city has become. Every time i see a cop i want to fucking scream.

I place no stock in the "coarsening of campus debate" hysteria. Such alarms are raised primarily by neoconservatives upset that new generations of scholars have entered the ivory halls of academe in the last four decades with last names other than Bemis, Buckley, and Brewster and are producing new kinds of knowledge and reshaping and reimagining higher education. Yet if such a "cheapening" is taking place, it's because of interventions like Jamie Kirchick's crass, childish, vicious ad hominem attack on Yale activist Thomas Frampton in today's Yale Daily News. The YDN should be ashamed of itself for publishing what amounts to a right wing hatchet job by one student against another. Whether or not Thomas's actions on monday night constitued the height of narcississm, it's clear that Kirchick well deserves such an appelation, and if i didn't think Kirchick had repeatedly proved himself to be little more than a whining child with aspirations to supreme punditude, i might urge others to question his own pathologies. Kirchick's account of the Coca-Cola protest, at which he was not present, is not accurate - police confronted Thomas, not the other way around (i was with him when they did so,) and then allowed him to pass when he presented his student ID), while his callous dismissal of the comapny's litany of global human rights abuses is simply outrageous. (Kirchick's contempt for "New Haven hangers-on" is elitist and offensive, while his numbers are also wrong - while approximately 20 'died' at the protest, there were at least a dozen others in the audience who were part of the action - designated as corpse haulers or leafleters.) I will not futher refute Kirchick's factual innacuracies here (though there are many) save to note that his notion that indignation at Levin's appointment to Bush's sham WMD panel in February was unwarranted and inappropriate ignores Levin's personal friendship with George Bush, which many feel played a role in last July's National Labor Relations Board decision at Brown University which reversed the 2000 NYU Precedent along deeply partisan lines. Kirchick's claim that Thomas's actions were merely theater deserves to be contested from the vantage point of performance theory - after all, all the world's a stage, and Thomas's improvised attempt to speak the truth to power anticipates a far more inclusive and democratic project than the fascist manipulations behind the convention's staging and the militarized perimeter surrounding it. But we also need to ask what theater Kirchick here performs, and why the Yale Daily News would publish such a self-aggrandizing screed of a monologue. But i suppose we can console ourselves with the fact that no one's really listening, anyway.

I'm glad that Thomas is free and am confident that all charges against him will be dropped. I have no other comments at the moment other than that like Evan, i too hate the YDN and am extremely happy that i am no longer included in the symbolic community imagined by their obnoxious mastheads.



edit: correct late night tense madness