"it's the same old story"/"it was only yesterday"

Just watched "The Battle of Algiers" in its new Criterion Collection DVD format, having never seen the movie before, though i'd heard a great deal about it from various friends who'd seen it in various contexts. That it reminds me, to a certain extent, of Sembene Ousmanne's novel God's Bits of Wood, shouldn't really surprise, i suppose, since both Pontecorvo's film and Sembene's novel attempt to document the disciplinary practices of and the tactics of refusal and resistance directed against french colonial power in North and West Africa, respectively, and if Sembene's novel predates Pontecorvo's film, (as the Senegalese general strike predates the Algerian Liberation Front's guerilla mobilizations.)

Much of the recent attention given Pontecorvo's film, which is certainly bolstered by the dvd commentary by none other than Richard Clarke (yes, that Richard Clarke) has concerned its frank depiction of the tactics of anticolonial insurgency - bombings, suicide attacks, children gunning down colonial soldiers, women concealing bombs beneath burqas, but for me what are more powerful are the ways in which the film deconstructs colonial knowledge itself, pointing towards the gaps in colonial reason, the moments at which that which can not be understood as possible, that which had been previously unthinkable, occurs.

Pontecorvo's narrative returns at several points to the shrill ululating of the arab women as a gesture of resistance and outrage against colonial rule. French and european narration finds this noise frightening and incomprehensible, impenetrable. The colonial news report which frames the penultimate scene of the film, in which the algerians, despite supposedly having been made quiescent two years earlier, with the deaths of the FLN's leadership, attempt to storm the european quarter and brave the machine guns of distraught french soldiers, narrated by French journalists, is punctuated by the ominous observation that the "muslim quarters still echo with those unintelligible and frightening rhythmic cries" of the arabs. This is the final line of voiced-over text for nearly a minute, as the colonial narration is silenced by the shouts of protest of the street demonstrations, the winding of the headless "tapeworm" toward the european quarter, until the report resumes, announcing that the french political class now strongly favors negotiating independence with the algerian insurgents. Is the subaltern speaking here? Maybe, though if so, through a lens firmly held by cultural producers grounded in the colonial Metropole. The more interesting question to ask concerns what the film attempts to say about the politics of knowledge, language, and speech. John Kerry speaks of the (p)resident's failure to "win the peace," a thinly coded nod to the language of empire and hegemony. Yet Pontecorvo's film suggests the instability and even impossibility of such an endeavor, as well as the violence and repression it is likely to involve.

whoever has been repeatedly searching for "ben healey, gay" really ought to stop already. Unless it's about the domestic partnership stuff. Either way, you should probably just ask him. He likes to talk to people. He's very good at it.

Weekend mixtape part deux. (like Hotshots)



not particularly inventive or edgy, but a pretty good picture of what i've been listening to today.



Automato: "Focus"

Frank Black aka Charles Thompson "Monkey's Gone To Heaven (demo, on newly released Frank Black Francis, available for free download from pitchfork.) "

Talib Kweli: "Going Hard"

Charles Mingus: "Moanin'"

S-K: "Dance Song '97"

The Cure: "Untitled" (the one from disintegration, not the new one.)

Minutemen: "Political Song For Michael Jackson To Sing"

Hi-Tek featuring Common: "The Sun God" ("I'm open-minded like a pothead")

John Lennon: "Gimme Some Truth"

Common: "The 6th Sense"

television: "marquee moon"

charles mingus: "Boogie Stop Shuffle"

iggy & the stooges: "gimme danger"

beatles: "and your bird can sing"

jay-z:"lucifer"

futureheads: "le garage"

fugees: "family business

bob dylan: "when the ship comes in""

weekend mixtape: in no particular order, which obviously defeats the whole purpose of a mixtape.

Elliott Smith: "Speed Trials"

Big Star: "September Gurls"

Gang of Four: "Guns Before Butter"

Silver Jews :"Send In the Clouds"

Leonard Cohen: "Avalanche"

The Wowz:"See You In The Paper" (I would have gone with another song, but this one's just too amazing.)

The Shins: "Saint Simon"

Yeah Yeah Yeahs: "Pin"

The Arcade Fire: "Neighborhood#2(Laika)

Sufjan Stevens: "For The Widows In Paradise, For The Fatherless In Ypsilanti" (See, Scott Stapp, christian music doesn't have to be fucking terrible!)

Le Tigre: "Deceptacon"

Camper Van Beethoven: "One of These Days"

Pavement: "Silence Kit"

Sleater Kinney: "Funeral Song"

NYT: Casino Strike In Atlantic City Lingers With No End In Sight

Kirk Townsel, a cook at the Hilton, said he saved $2,000

before the strike, which will have to carry him and his three children until

January. But he hopes to be back before Thanksgiving. He would not, though,

cross the picket line, he said.

"No, sir, not at all," said Mr. Townsel, 47.

"We're standing outside to let the management know that we're humans too - we

have to make decisions for ourselves."

The union increased its strike pay

from $200 to $300 last week to help its members hold on, and there are food

banks and social service workers at the union hall to make calls to creditors.

Other unions are also contributing money and manpower.

"If this was just

about the five-year contract, I'd go back tomorrow," said Dianna Coco-Tischler,

43, who quit her job as a preschool teacher outside Philadelphia for a

waitressing job at the Showboat that paid $600 to $700 a week. "But the

subcontracting is the No. 1 thing, and I'll stay out on strike for that, because

those could be our jobs they're giving away."

does everyone i went to high school with have a band?



I mean, i'm not askin' for much. Just a replacements-pixies-sleater-kinney cover band. Seriously.

News from San Francisco: The Examiner reports that the lockout has been ruled an "offensive" one by the California Employment Development Department retroactive to october 13, when the MEG refused to allow workers to return to the hotels. According to California law, this means that the hotels now must pay fully retroactive unemployment insurance to all 4,300 workers.

The news was the talk of the picket lines Thursday. Workers said

the decision not only bought them butter and eggs, but put additional pressure

on hotel operators, who will see their unemployment tax rate jump, Callori

said.

"Now they are going to be paying twice," said Chris Desouza, a waiter

at the Argent. "They are paying the scabs, and they are paying more unemployment

taxes."

In recent weeks hotel operators had sent workers letters suggesting

they were ineligible for unemployment, said DeSouza. The letters had undermined

the confidence of some union members.

Waiter Patrick Baird said it would

"strengthen the cause," but was nothing to celebrate.

"I'd like to make it

very clear: We would prefer not to have to get unemployment," he said. "We want

our jobs back."

Que bueno, no?

Radio City's a lot better than #1 Record, leaving behind the tinges of Zep-Foghat cheese for stunning dream-pop. Ah yes, entertainment on a friday night and all this talk of blood and iron is the cause of all my thinking but how can i sit and drink my tea with all this blood flowing from the television?



I just went walking up Mass Ave and bumped two former yale people within a half hour-45 minutes of eachother and wound up going to see The Motorcycle Diaries in the biotech-corporate outdoor mall that is Kendall Square with the latter, who is now a grad student at MIT, and a friend of hers. First time i've done anything social with anyone in quite a while, so that was nice. As for the movie itself, well, i'm conflicted. The cult of Che is a weird phenomenon. It seems to (attempt to) encapsulate all the complex interactions between the commodification of the revolutionary nationalisms of the old new left, polysemous constructions of transnational pan-latino cultures of a global urban migrant professional class, and unstable significations of an equally global specter of subaltern revolt. The film leans towards the former, with a heavy dose of messianic hagiography. The gender politics - well, let's not even go there. But the scenes with the migrant communist miners are interesting, the cinematography is beautiful, and Gael Garcia Bernal is both a great actor, and, uh, kind of hot. So i'm glad i saw it, and it was good to see Hanan.



Now i'm exhausted. And i have a conference call and client call practice tomorrow and i'm not excited about either. Actually, i'm pretty ticked off about both. Julie, you're wrong about troy, and you were wrong then, and for all its faults, we should have seen mean girls, and Alek never returns phone calls and i hope Noah's doin' well out in oregon. That's it for tonight, i guess.

"Ugh, what a disaster." That's Peter O'Toole dishing to the New York Daily News

about his last film, a little indie picture he did with Brad

Pitt called "Troy" (budget: $150 million-plus). "The director

[Wolfgang Petersen], that kraut, what a clown he

was," continues the acting legend. "When it was all over, I watched 15 minutes

of the finished movie and then walked out." Adds the unedited O'Toole, "At least

I had one good scene."

Peter O'Toole and I agree on everything but the last sentence. And the kraut part, i guess. And if Troy managed to suck even exponentially more than Air Force One, Wolfgang Petersen did do The Neverending Story, which was one of my favorite films when i was a kid, and is still pretty watchable despite slightly embarassing special effects. Apparently, Petersen's scheduled to direct a film adaptation of Ender's Game. (Let's hope he doesn't completley butcher it.) As for O'Toole, sorry, but admitting the movie sucked and then walking outof the theater doesn't exculpate you ofr stealing three hours of my life or making one of the worst movies of all time.

Locked out San Francisco hotel workers have set up a picket line around Sheraton (Starwood) Hotels in Waikiki, Hawaii. UNITE HERE! Local 5, in Hawaii, has contract language which allows them to respect picket lines in this sort of situation, and refuse to cross, and they are doing so en masse.

“The Sheratons in Hawaii have been sending non-union staff to be strike

breakers at the Sheraton Palace in San Francisco” said Hernando Tan, Local 5’s

President. “They entered into the fight in San Francisco, so they should not be

surprised that that fight followed them back to Hawaii.”

Sleater-Kinney signed to sub-pop. Whoa.

I went to the record store tonight to look for the new cd by the Go! Team, Thunder Lightning Strike, which pitchfork is raving about. I didn't find it at either of the two stores i went to. What i did find, for relatively little effort or cash, were two albums i've been looing for for months and one impulse buy i'm kinda happy about. The latter is an Al Green greatest hits compilation, the former are Big Star's first (and more or less only) two albums, #1 Record and Radio City, conveniently collected on one CD, and Sly and The Family Stone's There's a Riot Goin' On, which i have literally been hunting for since June. At the moment I'm listening to #1 Record, and being floored. No wonder Paul Westerberg idolized Alex Chilton, that "invisible man who could sing in a visible voice." This stuff is great!



edit: Oh, and Green's "Here I Am (Come and Take Me)" is in the running for best pop song of all time...

It's another one of those long, long days when all i really wanted was a hug, but instead i had to turn to the burrito. I've spent the evening thus far watching the first season of That 70's Show, for which i refuse to apologize, and you can't make me. I won't even write about the '70s retro schtick in the context of the themes of global reconfiguration of sovereignty and production as forumlated by Negri and Hardt in Empire (the walmartization of the economy, the offshoring of production and the rise of affective labor, (Red's layoff, the scene at the TGIFriday's Style restaurant in which the salad bar becomes the site at which (post)modernization rears its ugly head, (some of these are themes which i attempted to address in my senior essay)--what valences might the 1970s have for the present moment of global restructuring, in which the series is written, produced, and consumed? -- And of course, the construction and deconstruction of the family are ultimately at the center of the show's narrative, though one could write a dissertation about Wilder Valderrama's character, nostalgia and "the new immigration," and the Latinization of stereotypes formerly coded as primarily African American. Although there's even more there than that, and i'm not sufficiently satisfied with the way i'm dealing with the sentence immediately preceeding this one, which strikes me as both overly simplistic and clearly "looks from above" in ways which miss things. Shit. I guess i just wrote about what I said i wasn't going to write about. And I'm still watching, and writing about, a pretty terrible TV show. And i'm sick of them scheduling fucking conference calls on a saturday.

imagine the angels of bread

Stephen Osserman introduced me to this Martin Espada poem in the midst of the chaos of the fall of 2002, with DeStefano's eviction of dozens of homeless workers from the overflow shelter and Yale's continued harassment and arrests of employees leafletting their workplaces at the medical school. I read it often during the heady events of the year after that, and in some ways, particularly as we all "froze for a reason" during the March strike, it often seemed prophetic in its power. Now, in the midst of this brutal occupation of Iraq and the neoconservative project of reshaping the globe in the image of their idealized "New American Century," perhaps it's time to revisit it.

This is the year that squatters evict landlords,

gazing like admirals from the rail

of the roofdeck

or levitating hands in praise

of steam in the shower;

this is the year

that shawled refugees deport judges

who stare at the floor

and their swollen feet

as files are stamped

with their destination;

this is the year that police revolvers,

stove-hot, blister the fingers

of raging cops,

and nightsticks splinter

in their palms;

this is the year that darkskinned men

lynched a century ago

return to sip coffee quietly

with the apologizing descendents

of their executioners.



This is the year that those

who swim the border's undertow

and shiver in boxcars

are greeted with trumpets and drums

at the first railroad crossing

on the other side;

this is the year that the hands

pulling tomatoes from the vine

uproot the deed to the earth that sprouts the

vine,

the hands canning tomatoes

are named in the will

that owns the bedlam of the cannery;

this is the year that the eyes

stinging from the poison that purifies toilets

awaken at last to the sight

of a rooster-loud hillside,

pilgrimage of immigrant birth;

this is the year that cockroaches become extinct,

that no doctor

finds a roach embedded in the ear of an infant;

this is the year that the food stamps

of adolescent mothers

are auctioned like gold doubloons,

and no coin is given to buy machetes

for the next bouquet of severed heads

in coffee plantation country.



If the abolition of slave-manacles

began as a vision of hands without manacles,

then this is the year;

if the shutdown of extermination camps

began as imagination of a land

without barbed wire or the crematorium,

then this is the year;

if every rebellion begins with the idea

that conquerors on horseback

are not many-legged gods, that they too drown

if plunged in the river,

then this is the year.



So may every humiliated mouth,

teeth like desecrated headstones,

fill with the angels of bread. -- Martin Espada

And in the "what the fuck" department

NBC said Wednesday it has cut a deal with "Speed" screenwriter

Graham Yost to develop a limited series exploring the circumstances surrounding

the attacks that claimed nearly 3,000 lives and spurred the United States to

mount a global war on terrorism.

Speed? As in, like "Pop quiz, hotshot?" As in, like, terrible and ridiculous action movie starring fucking Ted "Theodore" Logan? This is almost as egregiously exploitative as the Republican National Convention. Oh wait, scratch that, actually, it doesn't begin to come close. But it's still pretty damn ridiculous. Kinda like the HBO special that tied the millionaire Yankees to the post-catastrophic iconography of New York working-class heroism. I hated Giulianiism in high school, and i hate it even more today.



"Ok. We're just two cool guys, just on a bus, just hanging out."

Overheard in 7-11 this morning while purchasing 24-oz cup of hot chocolate:

"I think I lost my wallet last night."

"No way."

"Yeah, when i was crowdsurfing. I think i lost it when i

was crowdsurfing."

(as a side note, it looks like i spoke too soon about the tear gas.)

Boylston and Mass Ave

Wow. Unbridled Euphoria. People dancing in the streets, dancing to the rhythms of honking car horns. People i don't know slapping hands with me as a matter of principle, and the drummers sitting on the little porticos outside berklee college of music as the revelers fill the intersection. Like quebec city without the tear gas, the fence, or the movements - though there were riot cops aplenty. I need to go to sleep, but i'm glad i took the walk. Much love to everyone

holy shit!

The Boston Red Sox just won the world series. I can hear shouting and whooping from the neighboring row houses.



Rock on. Mets in '05.

I've been consistently skeptical of the whole "metrosexual" thing. While, by many accounts, "metrosexual" is a category to which I might be assigned (though i'm not sure that i'm either emotionally mature or well-dressed enough to really qualify, nor interested in personal hygeine or food -- Ah, fuck it, i'm a slob) i question the assumptions about gender and sexuality, not to mention class and "culture", that underly this kind of categorization. And articles like this one seem to both feed Promise Keeper anxieties of the dissolution of traditional masculinity while ultimately reifying and unquestioningly accepting such notions as gospel. There is a similar dynamic at work here governing articulations of sexuality. What I mean by this is that "metrosexuality" is really a deeply heteronormative construction. And metrosexuality defines as Gay the "gay" James Kirchick wants LKI to enshrine, the white "Gay," the male "Gay," the cosntruction of "Gay" whose notions of sameness and difference are deeply rooted in the logics of class, race, and gender, "innocuous and quotidien, unthreatening and placid," in evan cobb's words.



One cannot fuck a city, at least in the sense that cities constitute more than the people and objects by which they are populated. (Although as an etymological sidenote, the "metro" of "metropolis" doesn't even mean "city." That's what the "polis" is for. "metro" comes from "metron": measure, size. That fact in no way excuses my crappy espanol.) And metrosexuality seems, as this article suggests, as much if not more of a marketing tool as/than an imagined symbolic community. Of course, it can easily be both at the same time, even to the same people. Or maybe this article is just really Foucauldian in its imagining of gender performance as a managerial technique. Indeed, Nancy Halpern articulates this notion of a new mextrosexual supervisorial stratum as ideal for the management of workplaces feminized by the new gender formations of labor and the increaisng centrality of the production of affect. I'll leave this open ended for now, because i've been up since four AM and am having trouble focusing. Plus, it's the world series, and i am living in boston, and well, you get my drift.



FUCK SCOTT STAPP!

More Yale Crap



Is it irony, ineptitude, or intent with which this Yale Daily News article omits any mention of Yale’s own investments in Sudanese Oil, a story which YaleInsider (remember YaleInsider?) broke way back in the John Stepp-less summer of 2002. Yale claimed to have divested from Talisman Energy by the beginning of 2003, though there was some doubt expressed as to whether this was, in fact, the case. Levin’s assertion that “we've had a couple of situations at Yale where our policy had mandated divesting ourselves of ethically questionable holdings" indeed may be his oblique way of referring to this controversy, although if this is the case, then the YDN completely fails to notice. What’s certain, however, is that Levin is definitely referring to Yale’s divestment from South Africa in the 1980s, employing the passive voice and the language of abstract necessity to mask the upsurge of student, labor, and community activism against the university’s support for the apartheid regime. Yale’s administration knows all to well that this was no neat mandate but a drawn out and difficult struggle, because Darth – err, Michael Morand, the Associate Vice President of Pure Fucki – err, New Haven and State Affairs, was one of the students who led the campaign. At any rate, Yale’s investments, with their reliance on massive hedge funds, are every bit as “ethically questionable” as Harvard’s, a fact which Rick Levin knows all to well, and which neither linguistic legerdemain nor wistful thinking can erase or fully obscure.

In Which I Briefly Weigh in on Yale Stuff.



This picture makes me really happy:



I don't know why, exactly. It's probably the Schnabels/EAJ facial interaction. I also like the Financial Aid postcard photo of Helena and the person i don't know who clearly rocks. Oh, i guess that's Sophie. Rock on.



I found Evan's comments on the whole LKI history-theory shibboleth and Kirchick Gay vs. Queer minirant really insightful and i'm glad i read them.



I'm exhausted right now because i have to get up at like 6 am to do some stuff i don't think i'm going to blog about for "security culture" reasons - particularly not prior to actually doing them. I've got a very long day tomorrow, but also an exciting one, i guess. (I could really use like a week off right now. But, I suspect, so could the 4,000 locked out workers in San Francsico and the 10,000 strikers in Atlantic City. So that means i get no such luck, which makes sense given the fact that as an IU staffer, my salary is paid with their dues money. As Abbey Jane Hudson used to quote Martin Sheen's character from The West Wing as saying, "Screw it. It's game time. Let's go."



And with that, it's naptime.

"Some people like to play baseball games.

Some people have their little hobbies.

We like to sleep.

Get out of the room."

Post # 300!

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom is mad as hell and he's not going to take any more bullshit from the Multi-Employer Group, the association of Hotels which has locked out 4,000 workers indefintely in an attampt to unilaterally dictate the terms of their contract and working conditions.

"I will do everything in my power to see to it that the city and

county of San Francisco does not do business with those hotels, and I will

extend that in multiple ways because I am very intense about this,'' Newsom

said. "We have people who are suffering out on the streets, and in turn the

image of the city is suffering.

"You will see me take actions to represent

my disappointment not just in the proceeding days and months but years. Even

when the strike ends (the hotel owners) will have sent the message that San

Francisco is dispensable as a city and its employees can be used as pawns, and I

will not forget that and I will act accordingly."

Pretty powerful stuff, but Newsom isn't the only one who's pissed off - the American Anthropological Association, of which my mom is a member, has stated that it will not cross a picket line and do business with a hotel that has locked out its workers.

The group sides ideologically with the union, and Brumfiel has

written that "anthropologists cannot, in all good conscience, meet in facilities

whose owners are using the lockout of low-wage workers as a bargaining

tactic.''

You go, social scientists! In forcing the AAA to move their conference, the Multi-Employer Group is costing the city over three million dollars.



How does Josh wind up in every photo accompanying every article ever written about anything UOC related ever? I'm just kidding. Rock on.



This is my three hundredth post at this site, my 625th on blogger. And it feels like only yesterday i was paranoiacally removing my old site from the internet, fearing the eyes of Bruce laexander's minions around every corner...

Serendipity



Attempting to convince Thomas to write a paper about Jerome Davis, i ran a google search and found this.

If the levity is lacking in my voice today, it is because I am

angry. I am angry because things are happening to graduate teachers at Yale

University that I never thought would happen here. Graduate teachers who have

made the difficult decision to withhold grades this semester are being

threatened, intimidated and bullied by members of the Yale faculty, with threats

ranging from academic probation, job lockout, expulsion, to the most threatening

of all: the threat to withhold letters of recommendation. As a result, academic

freedom, perhaps the most important freedom unique to universities, and crucial

to the growth and health of democracies around the world, is under siege. Here at

Yale. Yes, here.

Meanwhile, one of the perpetrators of this shameful and ongoing chapter in the history of the academic unionization

Professor Schrecker spoke last week at a press conference to expose

the fact that the Dean of Yale College, Richard Brodhead, wrote a letter for one

of his graduate students that described her union activity in a hostile way. To

put this incident in context, Schrecker explained that Yale has "an old and

dishonorable tradition of expelling dissenters from the academy."

is under fire now from David Horowitz's phalangists for "green-lighting" a Palestinian Solidarity Movement conference, some of whose participants may have been held some decidedly anti-semitic views. Sorry Dick, guess you can fool some people some of the time, but when you try to claim to represent something you went to great lengths to stifle, you ironically wind up on some fascist's website's shit list.



(And of course, not being in any way affiliated with Duke, and being way too lazy right now to do the proper background research, i can't make any claims about the veracity of the pseudonymous author's claims, though i can reaffirm my opposition to holocaust denial, the racist conflation of jews with israel, and of jews/israel with global capitalism, and support for the traditions of anti-zionist jewish radicalism, palestinain self-determination, anticolonialism, and social justice. Maybe Brodhead really fucked up here, though given that this is FrontPage we're talking about, i kind of doubt it. Or maybe he deserves our sympathy in the midst of a right wing assault. But if Dick Brodhead wanted my sympathy for his attempts to preserve academic freedom, well, he should have practiced what he preached nine years ago.)

Major League Baseball Fouls Out

For making business deals with Taco Bell when said corporation is the subject of an ongoing national boycott by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. It's really outrageous - A-Rod donating to Bush outrageous - that Selig et. al. would provide this kind of advertising for a corporation whihc is making millions off of what is essentially slave labor, exploiting immigrant workers through fear and even physical force to work for practically nothing. This is completely and utterly unnaceptable, and we need to make that abundantly clear to everyone from Selig and Steinbrenner to Martinez and Mientkwicz. Maybe we can get the players union to back the boycott or something.

Tom Robbins has an excellent article in last week's village voice about the NRLB and what's at stake for labor in defeating Bush.

In June, by a 3-2 vote along party lines, the Bush board overturned

a 30-year-old rule that provided one of the few protections afforded employees

in a non-union workplace: the right to have a co-worker accompany them when

summoned to the boss's office for a disciplinary interrogation. In July, it

reversed a landmark 2000 decision by ruling that graduate students—who now do

the bulk of classroom teaching on college campuses in return for little pay and

few benefits—are students, not workers, and thus not employees for purposes of

bargaining.

That decision was aimed at disarming successful union organizing

drives at campuses around the country, including New York University, Columbia,

and Brown. The ruling overturned a unanimous, bipartisan vote taken by the

Clinton-era board, which concluded after months of study that the workforce at

many large universities had changed dramatically, with adjuncts and graduate

students increasingly replacing full-time faculty.

Even those at the

workplace margins haven't been able to catch a break. In a little-noticed vote

last month, the board ruled against a group of disabled janitors in Florida who

were seeking the right to join a union. The board said they were not entitled to

do so because they were part of a rehabilitation program. The two dissenting

Democrats pointed out that the janitors reported to the same supervisors as the

rest of the staff and carried much the same workload. The decision was also out

of sync, they said, with the Americans With Disabilities Act, which seeks to

move the disabled into mainstream society. Barring the janitors from joining a

union continued the "needless segregation of those workers," the minority

members stated.

Procrastinating while waiting for my lead to show up for a meeting, i found this amazing pitchfork review of Attack Of The Clones by William Bowers which examines tropes of terrrorism and Empire in an entirely different manner than i did when first seeing the film. I especially like the part about genital-reminiscent headquarters.

"Yes, we professors are familar with methods of fear and intimidation." Amazing

While a slow deluge of Ashlee Simpson-lip synch hysteria-related stories have begun to appear on google news, (thus far, this one from Salon strikes me as the most incisive, while the AP story which is circulating's comparison of this incident to Elvis Costello's song switch and Sinead O'Connor's pope trashing strikes me as disingenuous in a comparison of intentional acts of punk rock refusal with something entirely unplanned and unwanted,) i nevertheless stand by the questions i raised in my post yesterday regarding the politics of authenticity and reproduction.

whoopee, Eugenics! Now i feel all better.



And while we're on the subject of fascism, check out this review of a museum exhibition on Hitler and music.

It's just past 7 am, but someone in one of the apartments near me (they feel more like dorm rooms) is talking in an incredibly loud voice on the phone. Living in this place is very weird, because you can hear all kinds of movement from the other rooms because the walls are so thin, and sometimes when you're lonely you almost get reassured by the audible presence of others, and then you realize that, in fact, you don't know any of these people whom you hear, and that makes things worse, like you're in solitary confinement or something.

Ashlee Simpson, (Jessica's "punkier" younger sibling) had a Milli Vanilli moment on SNL last night. I saw it happen, and it was pretty obvious. What interests me is not the fact that Simpson lip-synchs (no shit, sherlock,) but rather the general silence or lack of interest on the part of most media outlets. My interest isn't normative - i have no interest in whether or not "the people" should be up in arms over the revelation that some pop star most people over the age of 18 have probably never heard of is a fraud. What i am interested in is what this says about a)the current discursive status of "reproduction" as it pertains to musical consumption and "live performance," and b) both the current discursive framework and the historical trajectory of the trope of musical "authenticity" so central, in particular, to the consumption and reception of popular music in the 1990s and the construction of "the underground" and "indie rock" from the 1980s onward. (Remeber Reel Big Fish? Or Rob and Fab, for that matter?) I want to pose the possibly rhetorical question of what, precisely, the Simpson-SNL fiasco (or really, the lack thereof,) suggests about the ways in which popular music is consumed and produced in the post-napster era.

PS:
Let's leave off for the moment as a separate question Hip-Hop's privileging of "the real" as a separate question with its own valences and implications. 50-Cent's boasts about being shot nine times seem, to me at least, to address different anxieties and imagine a wholly different authenticity than that which was at stake in, oh, "Girl You Know It's True."

Two interesting articles about the Atlantic City casino strike and the San Francisco hotel lockout:



The Las Vegas Business Press argues that the Atlantic City strike is centered around the issue of power and reads the strike as a response tothe consolidation of the gaming industry.

Taylor highlights the two companies' treatment of its employees in

Mississippi, where workers are not organized, as an indication of where the

future Harrah's might want to take the rest of its workforce unless the union

can leverage its position. He notes that a casino worker in the Mississippi

market dominated by Harrah's and Caesars earns half the average wages of a Las

Vegas employee and that employee health insurance contributions for full family

coverage total $300 monthly.

"If you make $8 an hour, you're not going to pay that," he says. "We are educating our workers that it is the same company as the

one doing business here."The future Harrah's/Caesar merger, along with the

proposed merger of MGM Mirage and Mandalay Resort Group, has emerged as the

prime issue because it will change the industry landscape. The strike is the

first negative impact to come out of the announced deals. By concentrating power

in the hands of two companies, union officials suspect that companies will be

able to refuse employees' needs more easily in future negotiations because

workers will have fewer alternatives. Taylor says the union is trying to restore

the balance by providing workers with the same clout in having contracts in the

major jurisdictions expire at the same time. "One of the origins [of the strike]

is the mergers," he adds. "[Harrah's] has this feeling that it is all powerful

and wants to cram its contract down people's throats."

So the casinos are claiming that the union's argument is groundless because no employer "would risk demoralizing its workforce with poor wages and benefits in a service-oriented industry." Tell that to Yale.



And here's another terrific David Bacon piece in the American Prospect.

The limited lockout, instituted by 10 hotels after UNITE

HERE's

Local 2 struck four others, would be continued indefinitely, Huntley

said.

The Fairmount was one of the 10, and workers there had already gone almost

two weeks without paychecks. It wasn't economic pain that upset the three

workers, however. "They just don't respect us," Tejano said.

Well, the Daily Show book has been pretty fantastic so far. It's constructed as a faux American Government school textbook, and deftly evokes the sort of fascist hagiographic historical narrative that i remember being righteously indignant at having to pretend to pay attention to in fifth grade as Robin Tang and i secretly constructed draconic taxonomies in the back of gina kane's classroom. (The popular kids sat on the opposite sides of the classroom, with the girls on the side near the door, and the boys near the windows. Those of us who spent lunchtime recess saving the worms from predatory magnifying glasses, or constructing mythological suburban fantasy realms inhabited by telepathic insectoids, or creating and practicing secretive rituals involving bovine phonetics were exiled, partially by choice, and partially by the weight of the scorn of both our classmates and our teacher.) Textbooks are a site at which the nation is imagined and at which the imagined nation is reproduced (and i'm probably stealing this or rehashing or presenting an inferior rip off of a friend's three year-old Border Feminism paper i haven't read, but as Kurtis Blow might have said, them's the breaks,) and thus there's something both particularly subversive and particularly effective about Stewart et. al.'s project. Particularly devastating are the "Discussion Questions" at the end of each chapter, such as "If 'con' is the opposite of 'pro,' then isn't Congress the opposite of progress? Or did we just fucking blow your mind?!?" and "Remember that old Schoolhouse Rock cartoon about the bill who sings a song about how he becomes a law? Hey, and what about the Snorks? Remeber them?" (Of course i remember the snorks. I can still sing the fucking theme song, but that's neither here nor there.) Incidentally, i think everyone needs to stop what they're doing right now and thank mark bellhorn. Thank you mark bellhorn. Alright, wat was i talking about? Oh yeah, the Daily Show book. Yeah. the whole textbook thing is a completely brilliant idea, and i wish i'd though of it. And it's 12:23 am on a weekend, and i've lost the will to blog at the moment. I'll be more lucid later. Swim along with the Snorks!

Just got back from a four-and- a-half hour long walk up to Avon Place in Arlington and back down to find that i'm once again getting wireless in the apartment for the first time in about two weeks. That was a nice surprise. I'm currently vegetating and resting my feet for a few, and may head out later depending on whether i want to eat anything besides pasta and/or hard boiled eggs. Another nice surprise late last night, technically today, was learning that my Ipod, which i had thought irreparably damaged after it fell out of the case when i was in Dunkin Donuts last sunday, works just fine.



Oh those wacky Connecticut mayors. What will they think of next?

Snelgrove: sorry, Ms. O' Toole, but there's nothing "ironic" about the fact that a 21 year old college student was killed by an ostensibly non-lethal weapon: there have been numerous charges dating back years that so-called non-lethal methods of "crowd control," be they projectile (bean bag guns and rubber bullets) or ingested (tear gas, pepper spray) are far more dangerous than advertised. The crackdowns advocated by the police yesterday, who dumped nearly all the blame for Snelgrove's death on the riotous fans rather than on the police themselves, will doubtless exacerbate the situation more than they alleviate it, and it's infuriating that the police department can be as self-righteous as they were yesterday when a young woman is dead at their hands.



Kirchick: While i agree with Evan that today's column is far better than the norm, i also think that this passage:

We can debate the motives behind John Kerry's utterance until the

cows come home, but why both Kerry and his running mate, John Edwards, decided

to bring up Mary Cheney is a minutia compared to the conservative reaction. For

Republicans in support of the Federal Marriage Amendment, gays have usually been

a nebulous presence on the periphery of American life. It has always been easy

to imagine them as leather freaks or drag queens. That most gay people look like

Mary Cheney -- that is, no different from straight people -- is unsettling,

especially when you advocate that such people not enjoy equal rights.

besides the questionable grammar (minutia is plural), suggests Kirchick's abiding antipathy towards more radical forms of gender play and sexual expression, not to mention folks who identify as transgender or who have no desire to conform to the marriage norm, which Kirchick articulated in no uncertain terms in a column which he now seems to have removed from his website. I have a couple other problems with this paragraph, actually. It isn't really the case that "gays have usually been a nebulous presence on the periphery of american life." This has not been true since at least the 1960s and the gay pride movement, though, and i may be taking Kirchick out of context here . I'm also not certain that i agree with how he frames republican homophobia here. It almost seems like he's saying that it is the resemblance of gay people to straight people which ought to necessitate equal rights, which, and again, i may be misinterpreting him here, but i think i am not, is deeply problematic.

The 21-year old Emerson student who was critically injured by police outside Fenway last night has died. This is terrible news. I wonder what "non-lethal" weapon she was struck with, and how the hell this happened.

Hello. Is there anybody out there? Does anybody read this thing anymore? It's kind of lonely when you have no idea whtehr anyone is reading anything you write except for maybe you. So, if i may turn apostrophic for a moment, if you read this thing, POST every now and then - that's what the comment section's for.

Yesterday's great civil disobedience made it onto the front page of the Globe business section. You can read it, without the great pictures of us sitting down in the lobby and shouting "we'll be back" through the closing doors of a very full elevator, here.

They clean hotel rooms, tend bars, cook meals, and wait tables

at many of Boston's prestigious hotels and universities, an army of mostly

immigrant and low-wage workers that labors behind the scenes.



But yesterday, after learning that 4,000 hotel workers in San

Francisco are locked out of jobs at 14 hotels, about 85 members of this largely

hidden workforce walked into the sedate lobby of the Hyatt Regency Hotel in

Downtown Crossing and, seated on the floor, demonstrated until police officers

arrived and arrested six protesters on trespassing charges.



Outside, the demonstration continued as the protesters filed

out of the elevators, chanting, ''No Justice in San Francisco, no peace in

Boston."

It's a very good article, and does a pretty solid job of talking about the consolidation and globalization of the hospitality industry and has some solid quotes from our union's recording secretary Sebastiana Montero as well as Robert Reich and John Wilhelm:

''I will fight here with pleasure," said Sebastiana Montero, a

56-year-old housekeeper at The Lenox Hotel. Montero, a member of Hotel Workers

Local 26, marched in front of the hotel as a show of support for a sister union

in San Francisco.



''It is not fair what they are doing to the workers in San

Francisco," said Montero, who has worked at the Lenox for 29 years. ''They have

children; they have to support their families."

It was a great action. The hotel corporations responsible for the lockout in San Francisco better get the message. If not, "we'll be back."

***



Watching the game last night was fun, even by myself in my lonely and slightly smelly apartment. Watching the local fox affiliate morning show personalities argue over the gravity and/or existence of the post-game riot was also pretty awesome. I think Thomas, Lauren, and Amelia would have found it very amusing.



***



This Island may be significantly poppier than previous Le Tigre records, but i disagree with Nick Sylvester's conclusion on pitchfork today that it therefore lacks subtlety or depth. I find it hard to see how Sylvester can make the case that This Island is a less subtle record than, oh, Feminist Sweepstakes. This is very clearly not the case. And whereas Sylvester finds "New Kicks" a complete failure, for me it's both a shrewd update of/return to a tactic begun with Feminist Sweepstakes' "Dyke March 2001" and one of the first instances in which popular music has sought to grapple with the implications of one of the more momentous events in recent world history - the 10,000,000 strong global uprising against the iraq war. Sylvester's ruling of "I'm So Excited" as a failed attempt is utterly abitrary and unconvincing, and while some of his criticisms of the record may have some value, (though you'll have to tell me which ones these are,) I find his review, dissapointingly, largely, unjustified. I used to hate pitchfork. I think their positivist rating system is unquestionably ridiculous and some of the reviewers are in desperate need of either an editor or a reality check, but they've also got some folks who clearly love the music they write about and love writing about the music they love, and kn0ow their shit when it comes to independent music. I guess that's why i get so frustrated when they publsih a review that's this off. At any rate, I like This Island and recommend that fols go out and listen to it amd make up their own minds.

The NYT analyzes Jon Stewart's totally punk rock beatdown on Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala.

There is nothing more painful than watching a comedian turn

self-righteous. Unless of course, the comedian is lashing out at smug and

self-serving television-news personalities. Jon Stewart could not resist a last

dig at CNN's "Crossfire" during his monologue on Comedy Central on Monday night

. "They said I wasn't being funny," the star of "The Daily Show With Jon

Stewart" said, rolling his eyes expressively. "And I said to them: 'I know that.

But tomorrow I will go back to being funny," Mr. Stewart said, adding that their

show would still be bad, although he used a more vulgar expression.

Today's action will be fun. I'll blog it after it happens, assuming i figure out how to do that legally.

The Yale Herald wonders why so many Yalies go corporate:

Every year, 1,200 of the world's best and brightest students arrive
at Yale as freshmen, expecting to spend the next four years of their lives
immersed in critical scholarship. They are talented individuals with
wide-ranging interests, but when the senior year job rush sets in, many
students make career choices that have little to do with their program of
study. Four years ago, more than one-fifth of Yale seniors went into
investment banking; still today, 13 percent follow in their footsteps. What
is it within Yale's career culture that drives students from the wide-open
world of academia to the corporate haven of Wall Street?

Certainly, "career culture" has something to do with it - Yale repeatedly hammers into students' skulls (as in Gary Haller's now infamous assertion in the Spring of 2002, at a labor panel he had refused to award "Master's Tea" status, that to be a dining hall worker was not a valid career choice for a Yale undergraduate, which sent one longtime JE dining hall worker into tears) what kinds of jobs we must take, what kinds of paths we must follow. Yet this doesn't explain everything - this elitism privileges academia and public service as much as the corporate world, and, indeed, there is a very long tradition, beginning with Edward Logue in 1942, and continuing to the John Wilhelms, Lou Weekses, Nick Allens, Laurie Kenningtons, Grace Rollinses, and Abbey Hudsons, of Yale grads joining the labor movement as organizing or research staff.

What makes Yalies go corporate - or union (whether as dynamo staff organizers, muckraking researchers, or grad student teacher/researcher militants,) it seems to me, strikes (pun intended) from a much deeper structural condition of the Levin-era "Global University" in which what Levin terms the "work of the university" and the accumulation of capital are virtually indistinguishable. (Thank you, Bayh-Dole act.) On the most superficial level, we learn from the best. But really, this is a condition which arises from the manner in which Yale understands student, teacher, and schooling. While rejoicing that with the NLRB mandate, graduate teaching can now return to its "traditional role" witihin the university, the administration attempts brutal cost-cutting and taylorizing measures aimed at streamlining and gaining ever more administrative control over the production and transmission of knowledge. The laboratories increasingly resemble high technology sweatshops in which Principal Investigators, and really the university's licensing department and a handful of pharmaceutical, and/or biomedical engineering corporations reap the benefits of the grueling labor of low-wage graduate researchers, often immigrants, with only a slim illusion of substantive career advancement. In the wake of last fall's contract settlement, they laud a corporatist notion of the university as the human body, evoking biological metaphors of community even as they move to lay off workers, claiming a ned to cut costs only a handful of months prior to announcing that the endowment has indeed leapt by nearly twenty percent. Is it really any wonder, then, that the Director of Career Services refers to graduating students as "product?"

"The banks are focused on getting what they think is best, and
their perception is that the level of the product they get from us, [the Ivies,
and schools such as MIT and NYU], is higher," said Director of Career Services
Philip Jones.

David Bacon's opinion piece in today's SF Chronicle looks at the hotel fight as a civil rights struggle, both for the "overly aggressive," "noncompliant" African American workers whom the industry seems intent on phasing out, and the suposedly "pliant," "subordinate," and "subservient" immigrants from Mexico, Central America, the Carribean, and East and Southeast Asia with whom employers have sought to replace them. Bacon explicitly links the struggle of the locked out workers to freedom rides old and new and sees the birth of a "new civil rights movement."

This makes the union part of a new civil-rights movement,

geared to a changed world of globalization, in which millions of immigrants

fleeing war and poverty have become an important part of the U.S. workforce,

especially in service industries. They now encounter discrimination like that

faced for years by longtime residents, especially African Americans. Instead of

competing for jobs, workers could identify with each other in an effort to

protect the rights of all. The key is prohibiting discrimination against

immigrants because of their legal status, while enforcing affirmative action to

gain more jobs for underrepresented communities.

This is almost as funny as Jon Stewart telling Tucker Carlson "I won't be your monkey" (and calling him a dick, but i, for obvious reasons, find the whole "monkey" thing a lot funnier.)

Cheney Vows To Attack U.S. If Kerry Elected

...After his speech, Cheney was asked to confirm his remarks.

"Make no mistake: If Kerry becomes president, no one will be safe from me," Cheney told reporters. "Businesses, places of worship, schools, public parks: No place will offer you refuge. A vote for Kerry is a vote to die in your own bed at the hands of Dick Cheney."

Watched the game last night because the damn laundromat was closed. Glad the Red Sox won, watched some guy compare David Ortiz to jesus christ on the news this morning. It's rainy and miserable out and i wish i didn't have to work, but i do.



What's frustrating about this Onion article is that while this sentiment may sound out of place (albeit only slightly) from the mouth of a LULAC official, as we learn from Arlene Davila's Latinos Inc., it's one all to common among marketing and advertising professionals specializing in "ethnic marketing" to New York's latino neighborhoods. So while the article's weel done and pretty biting, it isn' really farfetched enough to inspire more humor than frustration.

Access to higher education as reality television?



This is really problematic. (Although not as problematic as the bush administration's opposition to affirmative action and roadblocks to making higher education more diverse and just, not to mention, oh, say, Yale's regressive debt-laden financial aid policies.

Note to my employer: Hiring me for a job which crucially involves telephone contact was an incredibly stupid idea. Doing phone work - having conversations with people, trying to gather information, is like making Vin Petrini, Helaine Klasky, or Tom Conroy tell the truth. Occasionally you get snippets of intelligible data, but that is few and far between. Mostly, i'm just a garbled, nervous mess. Oy vey iz mir.

Philly Inquirer - 3 union leaders arrested in A.C.

Robert McDevitt, president of Local 54 of the hotel and

restaurant employees union; Kevin Kline, a Las Vegas member of the local's

national affiliate, Unite Here; and Scott Cooper, also of Unite Here, were taken

into custody at New Jersey and Pacific Avenues, Atlantic City Police Chief

Arthur Snellbaker said.



Those were the only arrests during the rally, the third since talks

between the 10,000-member union first broke off on Oct. 1. On Thursday, talks

went on for 90 minutes before ending in a stalemate.

Yesterday, more than

10,000 people wearing union colors gathered at Pacific Avenue, outside the

Showboat Casino, to open the event. Union members from Pennsylvania, northern

New Jersey, Boston, New York, Las Vegas, and Baltimore marched for hours in

support of Local 54, a union that includes hostesses, food and beverage servers,

and housekeepers. The local and members of Unite Here have been walking the

picket line around-the-clock in protest of a contract offer that they say will

not put them on par with casino employees in Las Vegas.



Snellbaker said that a court order forbid the strikers from stepping

onto the streets and that he saw Kline and Cooper lead a line that was nearly

one mile long into Pacific Avenue, the city's second-most traveled roadway after

Atlantic Avenue.

"We made it clear that they were not supposed to leave the

sidewalks," Snellbaker said. "I told Mr. Kline I would hold him personally

responsible if that happened and arrest him."



Kline, McDevitt and Cooper were charged with criminal contempt of

court, Snellbaker said.

Police closed Pacific Avenue for about two hours as

strikers walked the street, Snellbaker said. Angry motorists honked their horns

and shouted as strikers walked by.

You know, i could have sworn the "angry motorists" were supporting the strikers. Gotta love the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Kelefah Sanneh on The Arcade Fire

And they went. A single guitar chord oozed through the speakers, and four of Mr. Butler's band mates joined him at the front of the stage, singing a wordless, full-throated overture while the drummer behind them kept time. Then the crashing subsided and Mr. Butler started to sing, his voice wild and shaky with half-swallowed terror. "Somethin' filled up my heart with nothin', someone told me not to cry," he began, with a violin line swelling and deflating behind him. And a crowd full of ecstatic fans and converts braced itself for the next crash.

Addendum: And Before i Forget...

One of the other cool things about today was an encounter i had while walking home from Arlington on Columbus Ave near my apartment. I saw a woman and her four or five year old (possibly three, i guess) child walking hand in hand and singing. This would have been cute on its own, but when i realized what they were singing, i was almost overcome by the cuteness. They were doing at least snippets of Meat Loaf's classic "Paradise by the Dashboard Light," with the little boy singing the "Let me Sleep on It" part, and the mom singing the female part. The oedipal implications, like the song's own ridiculously problematic gender politics, were pretty much trumped by the novelty of a little kid and his mom paying homage to bat out of hell.

"Don't Let Nobody Fuck With You"

It looks like Evan and I are more or less in agreement about the recent string of anti-judith butler hysterics on the editorial page of the YDN. That makes me feel smart.



This weekend has been much better than the last one in terms of personal wellness, and i may even be ready to resume sporadic blogging.



The mass rally in Atlantic City yesterday was awesome. I actually managed to get up at four in the morning (actually 4:10 - think i missed my first alarm) after a near-sleepless and somewhat miserable night of movie watching (the bizarre but watchable Saved!, (in which Macaulay Culkin and Mandy Moore deliver startlingly good performances in a movie which feels like it lost too much of its spark at the mandate of studio censors, Sweet Sweetback's BadassssssssSong, which i didn't finish 'cause i tried, unsucessfully, to fall asleep, and finally that old stalwart of masculinist retail employee existential angst, Clerks.) (I'm particularly baffled by Saved!'s climactic prom scene's use of The Replacements' "Skyway," but i'm inclined toplace blame for this on Michael Stipe, who produced the film,) and worrying about my grandfather, who was hospitalized friday, but who seems to be doing much better today, thank god.



At first, i couldn't sleep on the bus, so i listen to Dig Me Out and Meadowlands on the ipod. When we hit northeastern Connecticut, i saw a billboard for New Alliance Bank and became so incensed by hatred for all things Zaccagnino that i promptly fell asleep, and, after stirring briefly in bridgeport, lost consciousness until we hit the cross-bronx expressway. Joey, a business agent for my local and a former Geso organizer from the Div school who works next to me and is an all-around great guy, and i got into a conversation about Ipods, Paul Westerberg, and Husker Du, and we ultimately rolled into Atlantic City right on time.



The first thing i saw when we rolled towards the parking lot was the stage. The second thing was Wendi Walsh, who was intrepidly directing foot traffic onto the staging grounds, and as we rolled down the street towards the parking lot, there were Michael and fran, and Bill Granfield from Local 100 (where i interned two summers ago.) Serge and I carried the banner and led the cadre of folks from the local in front of the stage and past Antony, who i was pretty happy to see even though i forgot to tell him that the world needs Yaleinsider. I heard the booming and unmistakable voice of the rally MC, and that's when i realized that there was no way in hell these strikers were going to lose, because when Scott Marks emcees your rallies, then there's no way you can possibly lose. Raynor's Yankee boosterism aside, the rally was good, and in particular, hearing from the strikers was really powerful. Wyclef's performance was amazing - better even than the one he did at the IWFR rally a year ago. Ready or Not, Casino industry...



It was great to see all the New Haven crew and the folks from 34 and 35 and 217 - Bob and Laura, Duane and Beth, Jeremy and JCC, Cathy and Deb. It was also great to see all the GESO folks (there were quite a few of them) and hear from Mary Catherine and Mary and Kristie about how much ass GESO is kicking right now. Those guys rock.



The bus ride back was actually pretty fun, despite the hour long conference call i had to be on until i got disconnected by a tunnel and the insanely long delay before the GWB. Good to talk to scharff too. I feel like i have a much better sense of how the organizing staff here work, and reminiscing about New Haven with Joey and Katharine, (including the aborted plan to walk to Steve Matthews' house from the Milford Pilot truckstop) was a good way to pass the time. Finally getting home and falling asleep was exquisite.



Today was good too - I walked out to arlinton massachusetts and back, i talked to Katie on the phone, and i feel less frantic and besieged. The loneliness, while persistent, also seems manageable for now, and hopefully i will eventually find folks here to hang out with and figure out the grad school stuff (Denning, call me back!) and figure out how to run boycotts against tow hotels and stay sane in the process.

I interrupt my hiatus to weigh briefly in on a few matters.



First, the resistance to a methodology of queer studeis which incorporates Judith Butler's analysis of the performativity of gender, as evinced recently by both James Kirchick (whose hypocritical inveigling against personal attacks in YDN Guest Columns would be comical were his vicious attacks against Thomas Frampton less baseless and revolting) and by a far more measured and reasonable Jessamyn Blau, strikes me as being rooted in a fundamental misreading (or lack of reading at all, particularly in Kirchick's case,) of the theorization of the performative which Butler puts forward in the groundbreaking 1990 text Gender Trouble. To equate performativity with fluidity, with abstraction, as Blau does, ignores the extent to which Butler herself situates the performance and construction of gender within an ontological framework defined in relation to the ideological power of state formation, Foucauldian regulation and discipline, and the very real policing of what kinds of selfhood become permissible and articulable. To dismiss Gender Trouble and the work it has inspired as faddish poststructuralism ignores Butler's concern for the biopolitics of control and the violence with which power writes itself upon, and indeed, itself writes, the body. As she articulates powerfully in Precarious Life, among other places, Butler, like many other figures whose work engages with queer theory, is directly concerned with deeply resonant and important questions of social justice.



There are other problems with the (very different) critiques that Kirchick, Blau, and Larry Kramer himself are leveling. Jessamyn Blau writes

When I see a history class titled simply, for instance, "History of

Gay America," I will feel more comfortable with queer studies, and I will know

that it is finally an accepted academic field.

For such a social and cultural history of one queer community I would point Blau to former Yale graduate student George Chauncey's much-celebrated Gay New York, which i read in a Yale classroom in a class which had virtually no relationship to the LKI, which may itself indicate just how "accepted" queer studies is as an academic field. But what i really want to focus on here is the assumption behind Blau's call for the "simplicity" of a national framework which employs uncritically the term "gay" as a totalizing and exclusive site of interrogation. Butler, like many other queer theorists, has argued against totalizing universalizations of gender and "feminism" as reactionary and imperial. While the nation assumes a key role in the construction of discourses and lived experiences of sexuality, imagining sexual identity solely within the scope of a singular nation state or imagining sexuality solely as it informs a national mythos of plurality and multiculturalized difference both seem reductive of histories which have always been transnational (at least insofar as the nation has existed.) Secondly Gay America seems to me to exclude those on the margins of belonging - whether of citizenship and nationality - the immigrants, the refugees, the enslaved and the invisible, or of "Gayness" - those who inhabit the transgendered interstices of binary constructions of male and female.

***

Mos Def's The New Danger is occasionally brilliant, at times infuriating ("The Rape Over",) but mostly just frustrating. But when Mos proclaims "It's good to be back" on the album's final track, "Champion Requiem," we agree wholeheartdly: it's good to have you back, Mos. Meanwhile, Camper van Beethoven's Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart, which i only discovered last night, is brilliant from start to finish. I need to go and resume the hiatus, particularly given the fact that ineed to be on a bus to atlantic city at four thirty in the morning tomorrow. Oy gevalt.

Addenda: apology and assurance of sanity

Twelve miles later, and after a hot chocolate, a burrito, some pasta, and a pumpkin frozen yogurt from the place across the street, after Mass Romantic, Shine A Light, Funeral, Surfer Rosa, Doolittle, Folker, Turn On The Bright Lights, snippets of Nashville Skyline and Louder Than Bombs, and The Score, i'm feeling calmer and less hysterical, if still sad and frustrated about being lonely and not knowing what the fuck i'm doing here. I feel like a jackass several times over and to those who deserve apologies, i apologize once again. As for me, well, I'll think i will be ok, however hard getting to okayness will be.



But i think that ending the blog or subjecting it to a lengthy hiatus is still something i need to do. The voice with which i am writing here isn't one i like very much, and i have to figure out how to deal with that. Peace.

fuck it.

I'm putting this blog on hiatus. This may be a permanent hiatus, it may be a temporary one, but right now i have way too much shit to deal with to continue to assume a jocular facade for the slim number of folks who read this thing, most, if not all, of whom i would much rather interact in a more communicative and egalitarian basis than one in which they read my attempt to make myself look less miserable than i currently feel and may or may not offer any response. On the other hand, continuing to post about how miserable i'm feeling strikes me as unfair and counterproductive, and open to misinterpretation from folks i care about way to much to make it seem like i'm accusing someone else of a causal role in my own bullshit. On top of that, the whole thing just strikes me as ridiculously adolescent, and while i'm still (somewhat) sympathetic to jesse michaels' anti-yuppie assertion "knew i never wanted to grow up if that meant being a man," there are certainly other paths and other adulthoods, if that makes any sense, which it proba bly doesn't. I don't like being sarcastic and it isn't fair to ask folks to read day upon day of whining or self-deprecation. The original goal of this particular blog was to explore issues of cultural politics and theory upon which i have rarely touched, so if this thing comes back, i think i'll be doing more of that and less complaining about the vagaries of being a "bastard of young." Thanks to everyone who's read any of the three blogs i've wasted over the past few years and good luck to all.

best thing about watching a baseball game on boston TV:



The blow-by-blow post-game riot coverage. (In New York, no one cares if you riot. These things just happen. Especially if you're a cop.)

hallelujah

yes, brothers and sisters - after a week of cruel torments, tirals and triulations, humiliation and defeat, I, Zachary Kropotkin S-W have finally mastered a most worrisome opponent and figured out how to unlock the goddamned office bathroom door!

"I was looking for a job, and then i found a job, and heaven knows i'm miserable now."



I've felt lonely plenty of times in my life. At my second elementary school, in 7th grade when i was the big hairy stupid anarchist from suburbia, in 12th grade when i felt like the world had turned, and, to quote another paean to (post)adolescent angst, "left me here," my first year of college trying to navigate urine-soaked floors and cold marble hallways and not, as i would then have characterized it, get turned into a fascist misanthropic asshole for the rest of my life. (In subsequent months and largely through involvement with organizng and several friendships with some folks who mean a great deal to me, i ultimately problematized even the understanding of the world i initially sought to defend from Yale's colonial advances. This past summer was bad, but at least folks could tell me i'd find a job and shit would improve, but right now i either want to scream or cry or just go find someone to hug. Agh.



note to the editorial board of the NYT: weapon inspections may have "worked", but the sanctions, which killed over a million people during a twelve year period, need to be understood through a much more complex lens depending upon how one situates oneself in relation to the ideological matrices of security, insurgence, genocide, and "mass destruction." I don't really feel like getting into all this any more at this point, so maybe i shouldn't be blogging about it. Ah, screw it. I'm goin' out to get some food.



rocking:

Sufjan Stevens - The Dress Looks Nice on You

The Advantage - Batman 2

Bob Dylan - Corrina, Corrina

Sleater-Kinney The Hot Rock

It's on

Last week, workers at four San Fransisco hotels walked out in what unite-here local 2 president Mike Casey called a measured, moderate two-week strike. In response, the San Francisco Multi-Employer Group locked out ten other hotels. Yesterday, the Multi-Employer Group confirmed that they would lock out Local 2 members at the four struck hotels should they attempt to return to work following the conclusion of the two-week job action, and would continue indefinitely to lock out the other ten hotels as well in a brazen attempt to dictate to workers the terms of their working conditions, health care, and contract language. Local 2 Members - like local 11 members, and Local 25 members, and members of Local 1, Local 6, Local 217, Local 26, Local 2850, Local 7, Local 8, Local 5, Local 30, 226/The Culinary, and Local 54, aren't going to let the corporate behemoth that is the hospitality industry consolidate power in the ands of an unimaginably wealthy few at the expense of the thousands of workers whose labor creates that wealth.

Did Dick Cheney really just cite his support for el salvadorian death squads as an example of "the human cry for freedom?" There are a bunch of murdered american nuns and salvadoreno archbishops who might fucking beg to differ.

Josh Eidelson kicks some petrini ass with this great YDN guest column this morning.

Petrini's is a clever rhetorical trick and a shameful political smear: Paint whoever stalls your chosen development approach as soft on cancer. The hospital owes all of us – most of all, those neighbors whose quality of life is affected by every hospital expansion – more candor and less bluster. The hospital's concerned neighbors, who want to see cancer treated as much as anyone, deserve an honest dialogue about the impact of the hospital's plans on their access to jobs, housing and health care.

what part of "ningun ser humano es ilegal" no entienden?

so i moved from the hotel room to an "efficiency apartment" in a gentrified 'hood ful of good looking young wealthy white professionals and students. Pros: better food options, i'm stealing wireless, and i won't have to move again for a couple months, hopefully. Cons: no stove, so no pasta - unless i can boil water with my hot plate they have provided for me - but i'd need a pot for that first. No toilet paper or soap or shampoo yet is problematic as well, but i can remedy these things very easily, whereas the stove thing has me a bit more miffed. Enh, i'll live. And getting six new keys in like a three hour period makes me feel all mature and shit.

Well, i managed to find my way from my hotel to the union office, which is emboldening.



UPDATE: I'm lonely and stressed out already. And i'm hungry too.

well, i made it to the new burg, thanks to a ride from my parents who rock. I was supposed to be staying in like an "extended stay" kind of place, but none of them were anywhere near mass transportation or even the city itself, so instead i'm at a hampton inn which is way too bourgie for me but has wireless, which is kind of cool. HBO in the rooms, a bed bigger than some of the rooms i've lived in over the course of the last four years. Luckily, i'm probably moving to more modest dwellings at the end of the week, but the fact that this is all being paid for by workers' dues money makes the whole thing somewhat stressful and uncomfortable. I'm about to head out and figure out how to get to and from the local union office.

Music, briefly

This Week is fantastic. Jean Grae's skillful rhymes are worthy of all the praise she's been getting recently and more. I like Antics a lot and i don't buy any of the shit some reviewers have been saying about it - particularly the tiny blurb in the Times last week. It's a great album and Interpol is a very, very good band. I'm currently wrestling with The Beautiful Struggle. Train of Thought took me a few weeks to really appreciate, and while I recognized the ..., er..., quality of Kweli's solo follow-up within the first two listens, i have to admit that at first i skipped to Joy and was just pissed because the only line Mos Def has on the album is "Kweli i know how you feel." In retrospect, this made sense. Quality was Kweli's album, not black star's, and not even reflection eternal's, and it was a pretty incredible one. So i'm not going to post my reaction to the record yet, mostly because they're pretty muddled at this point, though "The Ghetto Show" and "Black Girl Pain" are both great, and instead try to listen a few more times and get a better sense of the album. It's been a pretty busy week in the realm of CD releases, and i need to check out some of the other stuff that's come out recently, but i have to say i'm psyched about the new Le Tigre and Mos Def releases the week after next.

people are talking about Fox News's "reporting"/clear falsification of post-debate Kerry quotes - screed like

"Women should like me! I do manicures."

"Didn't my nails and cuticles look great? What a good debate!"

"I'm metrosexual — [Bush's] a cowboy."

It's clearly fucked up that Fox is fabricating slander. But what i'm more perturbed by is that none of the people who are blasting this, including people whose opinions i respect and value enormously, are attempting to wrestle with what seems to be the most obvious element of Cameron's bizarre attempt at a fascist appropriation of The Onion (or something) is the stark homophobic logic which permeates/saturates the "jest." The not particularly tacit implication here is that while Bush is a proletarian he-man, a staid defender of revolutionary freedom and Western reason, (despite his Connecticut upbringing, incredibly wealth and powerful roots, and tenure at Groton, Yale, and Harvard,) Kerry is effete and effeminate, "metro" only because another prefix would be far too obvious a smear. Yet that to queer Kerry is to slander him is the real argument Cameron makes, the one he assumes is obvious enough not to even warrant consideration.



Bush isn't a cowboy, he's a preppie fratboy cheerleader turned yuppie fuck-up with a hard on for fascism and empire. Kerry isn't a metrosexual, he's a jackass. (And i've never found "the metrosexual" to be a particularly useful construction.) The ways in which Cameron constructs gender, sexuality, and their relationship to state power may not be novel, (though there's certainly an argument to be made about new imperial articulations of masculinity and heterosexuality in the age of San Francisco, New Paltz, and Samara,) but they warrant more than oblique references from folks struggling to bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old.



I'm moving to Boston tomorrow to start the new job after almost a week of grueling training. I'm stressed out and not totally sure if i can do this, so wish me luck.