good news

New Phone is operational. Same number as before. If you haven't emailed me your number, i don't have it.

post strongly edited

Just got a bill for $1390 for last July's endoscopy. And when i went to the same doc on wednesday they wouldn't see me cause i didn't have a referral. So not only do i not know why they are billing me now, or why my insurance apparently didn't foot the bill, i also don't know if the bacteria are dead or not, and meanwhile i still have acid reflux that would put Ashlee Simpson to shame. Also, i think i have the flu and haven't left my house in two days.



Shout-out to josh for the great column.

"Every Cancer is a Homicide"

They should name the route 34 connector after bush. That would be more appropriate: it's a road to nowhere.



Also: the times reports on the Gang of Four Reunion

the boycott works

I'm sure Unite-Here's boycott coordinators are thanking the MEG for the heads-up.

"The harassing phone calls to meeting planners have increased

dramatically," said Matt Adams, general manager of the Hyatt Regency Embarcadero

and a negotiator with the hotel coalition. "No one has canceled yet because of

it, but it certainly leaves a bad taste in their mouth."

The hotel

employees' union says it clearly and explicitly informed the hotels during

negotiations for the cooling off period that the boycott campaign would

continue. Mike Casey, president of local 2 of UNITE HERE, said the union has no

plans to back down from those efforts.

"We'll drive business out of these

hotels for the next five years if we get a chance," Casey said.

One group

that recently moved its event in response to the labor fracas is the MLK Labor

& Community Breakfast. The San Francisco Bay Area chapter of the Martin

Luther King Jr.-day event, and its 600 participants, changed from the Hilton San

Francisco to the Golden Gateway Holiday Inn, said coordinator Millard Larkin.

That move, Larkin said, came in response to concerns from participants, many of

whom are union members, rather than in response to any outside lobbying by UNITE

HERE.

Mark Theis, head of the convention division at the San Francisco

Convention and Visitors Bureau, said the bureau has received a handful of calls

in the past three days from concerned meeting planners who have heard from the

union. One inquiry came from a speaker who was slated to speak at an event held

at one of the targeted properties. Union organizers had apparently pulled up his

name from an online meeting agenda.

"It doesn't send a signal of wanting to

cooperate," Theis said. "Ultimately, once these things do get hammered out, the

people they are calling are the ones putting the heads in the beds they need to

clean or the people in the cafes where they are delivering coffee."

Casey

said the union was concerned with the hotels' most recent offer, which he said

still has "huge cuts in health care," including caps on how much expense

increase will be paid for by the hotels, as opposed to workers.

Real quick: i bought the new Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings album today - it's very, very good. even if i disagree with the liner notes that soul ends at Otis Redding, and i realized that the drummer used to play with some people i know in a band called Social Hero. Which is kind of crazy. I remember these things because Mattnick and Ben "obnoxious jerk" T. used to talk about him in high school for some reason, and you don't easily forget a name like his. (Want to know his name? Buy the freaking album. It's worth it. The cover of "This Land is Your Land" is incredible and i don't think it's even the best song on the CD.)

eulogy for a cellular telephone

this isn't actually the first time a cell phone has died on me. The first one croaked during the better way village. The second in a random monsoon that descended upon new haven while i was walking to the union office in early august of 2003. But I've had this phone (a nokia 3560 in an advanced state of decrepitude) in particular the longest, and for the sake of this argument (and since i'm moving to GSM service from digital, lets assume that these four different phones were in fact one.)



Until 2001 or 2002, i hated cell phones and i hated the people who used them for using them, for the most part. They were obnoxious, self involved, carcinogenic, and intrusive. Having a cell phone signified that you thought you were more important than me and/or you had/wished you had a more active social life. (The latter would not have been particularly difficult.) I would mock my dad when he used his and shake my head in exasperation at the cell-crazed USAYistas on a semiregular basis. Even during the UOC's frenetic first year, until after the march strike, i did all my organizing calls from landlines and pay phones, though the fact that Alek and Julie and Abbey -- and later K -- all had cell phones was obviously extremely convenient for me. This generally worked unless i was trying to get in touch with Thomas, who also didn't have a cell phone, or i needed to be readily available, like when i was writing this in the SML reference room and had to check my email every three minutes or so to make sure i wasn't horribly off-message.



During the strike i decided i was not going to go into any struck buildings unless i absolutely needed to. This meant that most - actually all - of the pay phones i had frequented were now off-limits. That meant i had to make organizing calls from home, and i was rarely there, spending my time mostly on picket lines or otherwise running around like a headles chicken or frantically writing a paper for Alicia's class or stupidly trying to give the TRASH people a guilt trip. So i couldn't do the organizing i needed to do, and i didn't find out about some stuff i needed to have known about until it was ex post facto. That was when i got a cell phone - it came in the mail and i picked it up from my parents place when i was in NYC for a few days over spring break. It very quiclky became a new appendage. Grace (self-reflexively) referred to cell phone users as cyborgs, and the analogy seemed entirely appropriate. I realized i could use my cell phone to scream at abbey and alek over the BWV, make julie crazy, and all the other things i liked to do with cell phones, like make elaborate firm and toned jokes. During the summer, when i was coordinating, with thomas and others, the student committee, the cell proved indispensable, which is why it really sucked when it broke. It helped me stay in touch when others were all over the place doing all kinds of stuff and keep everyone abreast of developments in New Haven, like when Rev Kimber made his now notorious phone calls or Culver "decided to spend more time with his family" or Claudia Merson said we weren't helping. Or when Saqib and i went on a wild goose chase for emma goldman's grave in the chicago suburbs. Oh wait, never mind. Sometimes i hated my cell phone, but on the whole i was and am glad i had it. And yet, in Paul Westerberg's words, i found myself wondering "how do you say 'it's okay' to an answering machine?" -- There were moments when (and i may be luddite or essentialist here) i felt like i couldn't communicate anything but empty platitudes when more was required. And it couldn't save me in Hershey, Pennsylvania when i realized i was going back to my parents' apartment and not even Julie's car's repeated breakdowns could stop that inexorable drive toward obsolescence, so i hurled it into some gravel. (Sorry cell phone, sorry Julie.)



Anyway, my cell phone died at like 4 PM in a pool of slush on the northeast corner of 79th street and riverside drive. I hope the new one has as exciting and rich a lifespan as the old one. yeah, anthropomorphism! Ave atque vale.

my cellular phone, Aug 2003-Jan 2005

I just fell in some slush outside and got my ass all wet and banged up my knees a little. I also destroyed my cell phone. I'll get a replacement soon, but if you need to get in touch with me before i do for some random reason, call me at home (email me for the number) or just email me. I will continue to check messages. Additionally, i probably don't have your number anymore if i ever did, so if you want me to have your number, please email it to me.



thanks.

I finished American Workers, Colonial Power this morning, and i find a lot to like about it. Fujita-Rony does a stellar job of narrating transnational migrations and connections, locating labor struggles within larger structures oand circuits of imperial exclusions and migrations, and problematizing gender and sexuality. Her critique of liberal multiculturalism and her insistence on documenting the ways in which Filipina/o workers transformed the economy, culture, and politics of the (trans)pacific (north)west in the 1920s and 1930s, as opposed to a less theoretically complex model which posits the workers as objects defined by but having no real effect upon the metropolitan urbs to whihc they have migrated is compelling. Fujita-Rony's history of the male migratory workers' union, whihc is initally started by business interests but ultimately splits with the AFL and merges with UCAPAWA but has a far more complex and problematic relationship to women - both working women and the wives and widows of union members - than that union had among Mexican, Mexican-American, and Jewish workers in the canneries organized by women like Dorothy Healey (yes, Ben's grandmother) and Luisa Moreno in Southern California, is fascinating.



Where i have trouble with the book is where Fujita-Rony employs concepts like "mainstream" American culture without contextualization or parenthetical qualification. And i also wish the book was about twice as long as it winds up being. There are some brilliant ideas here that i think could have used further exposition.

Me from the north country

I walked eight miles in the blizzard today, and it was exquisite. I love snow. I have since i was a baby and my mom took me outside to play in it in Philly. Snow is the coolest thing ever, and it's definitely my favorite inclement weather condition. If a bird had landed on a hemlock branch above me and shaken it on my head, it would have totally saved i day i would have otherwise rued. Unfortunately, that didn't happen, so i wound up ruing today a little. Well, not so much today as the whole jobless, 23 (and a half), single and lonely, living with my parents again thing, with dreams of accelerated male pattern baldness and a hopefully grossly exaggerated sense of impending obsolesence.

Minnie Driver is on the TV right now. She is my dawg. I probably shouldn't have left the job.

I am really happy about the snow. I do wish i had someone to share it with, though.

class war, shaken not stirred

It's billionaires for bush, without the subversive irony.



Boola Boola.

Don't Know When I'll Be Back Again

I'm interested in airports. Like Catullus 5, odi et amo - i both hate and love them.The how isn't important, and ultimately niether is whether i like them or not. (Recently i fucking hate them, but again, not important other than its indication that i am a total fucking hypocrite.))



I'm interested in airports as spaces which have become in themselves representations of movement and connectedness, unification and globalization and convenience, as well as of exclusion, securitzation, surveillance, and collapse.



The film "Love Actually" presents the airport as a site of reunification, where friends and lovers cross borders and find each other. Absence and distance are destructive, but redemptive, and airports return what they take away and make almost everything alright again, save for Alan Rickman and Emma Thompson's characters' marriage, destroyed by the lure of new conquests and the simulacra of familiality/familiarity. (And yet potentially rehabilitated by the construction of the familial unit (though not necessarily heterosexual) as biological inevitability.) Compare this to Stephen Frears' Dirty Pretty Things, in which Heathrow is a site of rupture, departure, and fragmentation, of heirarchies and "flight" and loss, as well as of the violent racialization of citizenship and displacement. These are two very disparate representations. Iti shouldn't be much of a surprise to folks who read this blog on a semiregular basis that i find a greater verisimilitude in the the latter image, which strikes me as more compelling and complex and resonates with my own recent experiences in airports - the dull roar of floor buffers in the Phoenix airport at 3AM on my twentieth birthday operated by subcontracted immigrant workers in what may be the fastest growing right-to-work state in the country, or the split lines at JFK customs after i flew back to New York from DF last year and, even in the "citizens and permanent residents" line. watching folks with greencards and visas forced to stand in line and have their picture taken by the all-seeing eye of sauron/homeland security camera as airport cops leered at their accents and confusion. So Airports are invasive, and indeed even the reunions they promise are always fleeting and bittersweet, and so much goes unseen and unsaid. I need to see Maria Full of Grace, i think. And i haven't even mentioned Jackie Brown or The Terminal (the latter of which i have not seen and would probably strongly dislike.) I am going to sleep.



a quick link on sex work from the village voice, which has ignited a great deal of deserved criticism for not talking about race, class, and the state.

"processing" (a non ISOmetric analysis of the last three days.) And Stacey the twizzler recipient.

I returned from the inaugural protest in DC about three hours ago, and have been trying to figure out how i am feeling and what i am going to do with myself since around 4 PM last night. I had not initially planned on going. I didn't think, and don't think, the protests were effective, but i was more or less( more "less" than "more"(excuse me while i revel in my own incoherence)) kidnapped by Lauren, Amelia, and Noah on wednesday morning while they were en route from New Haven to New York, for which i am grateful. The trip down to DC was uneventful until we hit Philly (noah claimed that it was faster to go through philly than through jersey. Noah was clearl;y wrong.) First, all lanes on the betsy ross bridge on 95 were shut down, so we tried to bypass the city to the west, whihc wound up taking five hours or so (we made a friend in the car next to us. Her name was Stacey, she was trying to get to dance class in Broomhall, and we fed her twizzlers.) I emphatically pointed out to A, L, and N when the barely moving crawel of traffic took us past the barely remembered places where i spent the first eight years of my life - Haverford, Ardmore, Bryn Mawr, Swarthmore...



The traffic eventually cleared after we stopped for dinner, and we sped through Delaware and Maryland. I think time passed so quickly because we were having a really interesting conversation (for me, at least) about the UOC and organizing and "dropping out" and New Haven. We finally made it to DC around 1 AM. Noah and i collapsed on Noah's brother's couch. Just before i awoke i dreamt that i had lost all my hair and that it had fallen all over Noah's brother's carpet. A young african american woman who had also lost all her hair and whose hair was also all over Noah's brother's carpet tried to console me with the potentiality that i could now be like michael stipe. I awoke confused and disoriented and quickly became rather bemused.



Noah and i walked tot the Metro, where we met Lauren and Amelia, and we ate some food at a nearby whole foods market and made fun off the republicans sitting behind us. Then we got on the metro, which is set up exactly like the BART and is the most fascist subway system i have ever seen. It's sterile, unhgappy, dead, and policed with the iron hand of the same folks who just shot pepper spray pellets at non-violent protesters for no fucking reason. I'll get to that later. Anyway, before i knew it, we were in Malcom X Park, and there was Emily Jones, who i hadn't seen in eight months, since Erin and Saqib and I helped move Erin's bed (which used to be Katie's bed, which used to be Arthur's bed) into Emily and Gia's new apartment. Before i knew it, i was surrounded by UOCistas and other yale folks - Marissa (and her brother, who i thought was the tallest person i ever met until i met erin's housemate jacob who is literally twelve feet tall and on whose air matress i slept last night,) and Helena, and Gloria, and Gia, and Carolina and Sylvia. It was great to see all of them, and their singing made an otherwise useless march kind of powerful. It's a shame that Julie and Thomas couldn't make it and that Phoebe and Josh are just total punks. Just kidding, i love you kids. And it was really, really good to see Erin for the first time in eight months.



The maoists were ridiculous, dogmatic and annoying, but at least those of us on the DAWN march didn't have to deal with ANSWER (not to be sectarian or anything.) The anarchist-initiated splinter march didn't seem like it was really working too well. And then the cops reportedly decided to brutalize non-violent protestors for no reason (although arrests (and, for that matter, numbers) were nothing like what we saw with the NoRNC mobilizations here in august,) marking the first, or is that "frist" such incident of the day. Sometimes typos are downright revelatory. Still, i think the coffins remained siginifiers as powerful as they were in New York. Singing Woody Guthrie and "Carry It On" and "Solidarity Forever" held a profoundly strong symbolism for me - placing forth enduring visions of collectivity and the commons against the inauguration's celebration of greed, private power, and warmaking. Even "if i had a hammer" managed to be significantly less corny than usual. And no i am not a fucking hippy so fuck you.



Took off after the march with Erin, Carolina, Sylvia, and Erin's friend Tali. Had lots of run. Read some of Dorothy Fujita-Rony's book American Workers, Colonial Power: Phillipine Seattle and The Transpacific West 1919-1941. It's really good. Turns out she got her PhD at Yale and her Dissertation Committee consisted of David Montgomery, Michael Denning, and Hazel Carby, which makes a lot of sense. Went to the American Friends Service Committee's Installation of boots of the 1370 or so american soldiers killed in iraq thus far, plus a lot of civilian shooes representing the indeterminate number of iraqis killed since the invasion began. I had mixed reactions to the religiosity and sanctimoniousness explicit in the ways in which some of the exhibit was presented, (the music in the church seemed Garish and sappy and made me very angry for some reason) but I found it extremely powerful to hear families of the dead, and iraq war veterans talk about their loved ones and indict the Bush administration for it's war of lies and empire even as inaugural revelers drove by in pearly white stretch limousines flanked by black secret service cars and cop wagons blaring their sirens in an unsuccessful attempt to drown out the sorrows and righteous anger of the grieving.



Ethiopian Food and chilling out in Tali's apartment and telling the pee story in its entirety for the first time in a while and just hanging out with Erin in general were all good. Freaking out about my life and the future and forgetting my backpack in the process was not so good. Even worse was finding out this morning that while this was happening, A, N, and L were tear gassed and pepper sprayed and the DC PD pulled a Victoria Snelgrove on at least two women who were nonviolently protesting along the parade route at some point over the course of the evening. As far as i know, no one was killed, but i'm outraged and this seems a matter of luck rather than design.



So yeah I freaked out about stuff a little last night and i feel pretty shitty about it and i feel better now, though i still need a job real bad. And an apartment. And the Kid upstairs who is fucking around on the guitar needs to turn down the fucking volume oh god i am turning into a ninety year old man or maybe just an ageist asshole. Purple Haze really isn't that hard to play, kid.



The bus ride back to NY was uneventful. Read more of Rony's book, slept a bit, listened to jerk behind me make flirtatious phone calls to at least four different women. Felt slighlty jealous and slightly righteously indignated. Talked to Alek today. Alek, Erin and i are all on board to go get arrested should GESO strike. I will work on organizing others, which, for the record, is what i told Mary R. i would do when i saw her during the Atkantic City Strike. Speaking of which, the DC hotel settlement sounds fantastic. Alright, time to figure my life out.



If you're like me and you weren't able to get a hold of Piracy Funds Terrorism before it sold out, good news - you can download the whole album here, and it's pretty great - check out "pop," spliced with the beat from dead prez's "hip hop."

'04-06/'07, and NUP no more

DC hotel workers overwhelmingly ratify what sounds like a stellar three year contract, while the New Unity Partnership disbands having "served its purpose." Oh, and geso geso geso!

Today marks the 90th anniversary of Wobbly Poet Ralph Chaplin's penning of "Solidarity Forever." (I am indebted to Erin Scharff for reminding me of this.) In honor of this august anniversary, i reproduce the song's lyrics, sans assorted feminist, farmworker, Local 34, and GESO verses which have been appended to it in the course of the last nine decades, in their entirety.

When the unions’ inspiration through the workers blood shall run

There can be no power greater anywhere beneath the sun

Yet what force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one

But the union makes us strong



Chorus

Solidarity forever

Solidarity forever

Solidarity forever

For the union makes us strong



Is there aught we hold in common with the greedy parasite

Who would lash us into serfdom and would crush us with his might

Is there anything left to us but to organise and fight?

For the union makes us strong.



It is we who plowed the prairies; built the cities where they trade;

Dug the mines and built the workshops; endless miles of railroad laid;

Now we stand outcast and starving, 'midst the wonders we have made;

But the union makes us strong.

All the world that's owned by idle drones is ours and ours alone.

We have laid the wide foundations, built it skyward stone by stone

It is ours, not to slave in, but to master and to own

While the union makes us strong.

They have taken untold millions that they never toiled to earn

But without our brain and muscle not a single wheel could turn

We can break their haughty power, gain our freedom when we learn

That the union makes us strong



In our hands is placed a power greater than their hoarded gold

Greater than the might of armies magnified a thousand fold

We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old

For the union makes us strong

In the spirit of awards season

And the first annual Problem Of Leisure "Possibly Worse Than Levin" award goes to... Larry Summers

- The president of Harvard University prompted criticism for suggesting that innate differences between the sexes could help explain why fewer women succeed in science and math careers.

Lawrence H. Summers, speaking Friday at an economic conference, also questioned how great a role discrimination plays in keeping female scientists and engineers from advancing at elite universities.

The remarks prompted Massachusetts Institute of Technology biologist Nancy Hopkins -- a Harvard graduate -- to walk out on Summers' talk, The Boston Globe reported.

"It is so upsetting that all these brilliant young women (at Harvard) are being led by a man who views them this way," Hopkins said later.

so much for that whole "right to work" thing

a work in progress

The contradictions implicit in the "third wave" ska revival's constuction of "traditional" or "trad" ska can perhaps best be seen in the very real differences between The Mighty Diamonds' "Have Mercy" and the Bluebeats' rocksteady revival song of the same name, written by ex-Scofflaw Mike Drance and appearing on the group's debut album Dance With Me, which was released in 1997 (or was it '96) by Moon Ska Records NYC.



The Mighty Diamonds were and remain a classic roots reggae vocal trio. They formed in 1969 and rode to fame on tour with Toots and The Maytals. On "Have Mercy," lead singer Tabby Diamond asks for mercy for himself and as part of a collectivity (the postcolonial Jamaican diasporic subject.)



Drance was a founding member of The Long-Island based Scofflaws, a sort of bar-ska band and one of the early dominators of the New York ska scene. He left the Scofflaws after their second album (if i remember correctly) and fored the bluebeats, a rocksteady revival group who played a mixture of covers (Ken Boothe, Stranger Cole, The Wailers,) and originals. "Have Mercy" was on of the original tunes penned by Drance. In it, he dispenses with the politicized religious discourse of the rastafarian Diamonds and instead implores listeners to "have mercy" on the homeless, whom he constructs as an "other," but one with a fluid boundary between the other and the self. The negation of the boundary is easy to imagine and may one day dissappear, the song alleges. Yet the assumption of divinity here by the white male metropolitan subject, and the erasure of the subjectivity articulated by Tabby Diamond, reveals only some of the colonial dynamics present in the ways in which the "third wave" constructed the first.



(Gone were even the antiracist politics of the two-tone era - this was a music marketed to white youth, largely by white youth. There was a profound dehistoricization, particularly in the work of the most succesful bands and their marketers, and even the mastery of the knowledge of the "jamaican era," presumed static and dead, was a mastery intended for and by white consumers.)

"and lived to tell about it"

This is scary because the guy from Bush's inaugural committee actually has the same last name as sideshow bob. Well, among other reasons.



"Lisa, we have elected officials so we don't have to think all the time."

GOOD NEWS FROM DC

Hotel Workers in Washington have reached a tentative agreement with the Hotel Association. They'll vote on the contract next week. Can't wait to see the details

Can a concentration camp really be reduced to some sort of "learning opportunity" or punishment for a misbehaving aristocrat? Does anyone else find this incredibly insulting?

Ark-type weather

Will you look at this fucking rain?



Bob Proto's letter in the YDN is a much better and more eloquent response to Keith Urbahn's ridiculousness than my rant (though this should surprise no one who's ever heard Bob speak)- as were the letters by Jay Driskell and Theresa Rundstettler yesterday.

How dare Keith Urbahn suggest in his column ("Earth to GESO:

Efforts to unionize are a lost cause," 1/12) that racial discrimination at Yale

is only "tangentially related" to the missions of our unions? For years, Yale's

increasing use of casual workers hurt black and Latino workers more than anyone

else. Our union fought to stop this abuse, and we demand that Yale provides

everyone with equal opportunity regardless of the color of their skin. So when

Yale's graduate teachers see the same thing happening in the classroom -- Yale

hiring more and more women and people of color into "casual" teaching positions

while reserving the good tenured jobs for white men -- then it's natural that

they would turn to Local 35 to learn how to fix the problem. Stick together.

Stand strong. That's how you get Yale's attention

And Evan's guest column ties it all back to the classroom

In a few weeks new surveys will go out, and just as I have for the past

three terms, I will declare that, no, my job description isn't accurate at all.

And just like in past terms, I'll hope that somewhere, in the spirit of making a

contribution to the academic mission of the university, an administrator will

see this problem and find a way to solve it. But perhaps more disturbing than

the problem itself are the solutions Yale administrators have already proposed.

In response to my survey answers last semester, Yale College Associate Dean

Judith Hackman wrote to me to explain that language teaching is supposed to be a

half-time commitment and that I should meet with my Director of Graduate Studies

"to adjust [my] teaching responsibilities." When administrators would much

rather ask teachers to plan less, prepare less, grade less attentively and spend

less time with students, instead of dealing with a broken pay scale, it becomes

clear that the system is broken. The very deans who are supposed to be guarding

and securing excellence in education are actively encouraging its

detriment.

only in dreams?

I just awoke from one of the more bizarre dreams i can remember having. The Yale administration or the united states government or both had abducted activists from all over the country and put us in a training camp somewhere in some city (Boston I think. Definitely wasn't NY or New Haven) so they could test out their activist busting methods on us. The only other person there whom i knew was Lauren M. Burke. They made us do all kinds of stuff (maybe i was thinking about torture and Abu Ghraib, although this may have been more a meditation on graduate school or possibly reality television. At any rate i don't think they made me masturbate or hooked me up to electric shock crap or anything like that, just made us sit through bad lectures and kept us confined to this place. At one point Johnnie Cochrain was was wading through th mud outside with his entourage, and the place had turned into some suburban manse in long island or maybe arizona, though maybe i just thought that cause lauren was there.



today's ydn has like thirty billion angry responses from GESO folks, which is why i actually still read that sad excuse for journalism, so that makes me kind of happy.



"Heathers" has the best dialogue of any movie ever.



Pitchfork's redesign is cool, but Nick Sylvester's ODB review is badly written and treads on some problematic ground.

Keith U. Lies

in his insulting, anti-GESO invective in the Yale Daily News today, KU writes "or that over the summer the National Labor Relations Board unequivocally struck down any right for students to organize as employees ..."

Keith, i don't know what parallel universe you live in, but in this one, a 3-2 ruling on bitterly partisan lines (ever read the opinions of the dissenting judges? Yeah, i didn't think so,) is hardly "unequivocal." Calling GESO's history "unremarkable is vicious slander of another sort, but i won't get into that - and Urbahn's carping about the 2003 election fails to account for the year and a half of research over the turnout and the university's anti-union campaign by simply and slanderously referring to the entire process as "rigged." Maybe he would have been better at paying attention if he weren't so busy celebrating hate crimes.

For an organization that claims to represent graduate students, it seems that in reality, GESO represents an underwhelming few. GESO has become increasingly involved with locals 34 and 35 on issues that are at best tangentially related to graduate student organization. This involvement -- the result of some students' leftist political leanings and GESO's implicit grouping of students with blue-collar workers as dual victims of the big, bad Yale Corporation and the miserly Dick Levin -- has alienated many in the graduate community who believe the organization should remain apolitical.

But then again, maybe GESO's political posturing has paid off. Duped by that word "union" and the "Norma Rae" fantasies of some Yale graduate students -- or more likely, attracted to the opportunity of political allies in the fight against the Yale administration -- members of the real unions locals 34 and 35 attended the December meeting, dutifully holding up signs and chanting in support of the new "union" of graduate students.

Okay, first the alliance with the federation compromises GESO's integrity as a union. Then 34 and 35 are the "real unions" and GESO is Sally Field. (Can I be Ron Leibman?) Get yourself together, buddy, you aren't making any sense. And "new"? GESO is fifteen years old. That's longer than George Bush has been sober! Try telling any rank and file leader in 34 or 35 than GESO isn't a "real union." On second thought, you probably don't need to do that, because you go to Yale, and you know everything.

Thanks a lot, Holcombe Green



(too bad HG's House Of Cards isn't up anymore.)

I just saw Hotel Rwanda with my friend Austin. On the whole, i think it was very good - it established the colonial constructions of the ethnicized categories early on, and dwelt not on the civilization versus barbarism tropes one might expect in a Hollywood movie, but instead looked at the racialized global divisions and definitions of peoplehood very critically. There were problematic moments - while Western racism is problematized, all of the Americans and Europeans we meet in the film are nevertheless depicted as kind humanitarians and good samaritans. The terrible voice of indifference is transmitted only through radio boradcasts of Bill Clinton promising to aid only American citizens and a State Department spokesperson who engages in the linguistic gymnastics of when genocide is not genocide. And with the exception of the scene in which he explains Western racism to Cheadle's Russessabegina over a shot of scotch, (which is, i suppose, his pivotal scene,) Nick Nolte as heroic American Colonel with the UN Belgian special forces is not particularly believable. But i hold that this film is worth seeing and i'm interested in other folks' reactions.



I heard today that a friend from high school had been hospitalized with "cancer or something." I was extremely worried. Turns out it's something of a false alarm. The surgery was minor, the friend is ok. I'm relieved, but i feel guilty too, because of the folks we've lost over the past seven and a half years. Relief seems sordid.

More on Subtext and Radical

continuing the discussion from the post below, you can actually obtain a copy of Subtext directly from the filmmaker herself (Laura Dunn, a '97 AMST B.A.)



I remember Alek telling me that that's how he got his copy. Also here's Emily Eakin's 1996 review or Radical and general overview of the GESO fight circa year 6.

waiting for you to call me up and tell me i'm not alone

I found this NYT article on call moitoring fascinating in its insights into the surveillance and policing of affective labor. Workers are graded on their "empathy."

Now call monitors rate operators by checking off boxes on detailed electronic questionnaires that assess qualities like efficiency, conversational skills and ability to mollify frustrated customers. The scores from each monitored call are collected to rank an operator's performance.

Handling angry callers "is like dealing with road rage," Mr. Pike said.

Operators who can defuse aggression - a not-insignificant talent - win plaudits. Operators also have to deal with the slow talkers, the lonely chatterers and the absent-minded. At night, the drunks come out.

And the article also talks about how this work is racialized and the relationship between racialization, outsourcing, and capital flight.

With thousands of call center jobs moving overseas, monitors are also noticing a growing reaction against operators with foreign accents. More customers now ask to speak to an American after they hear an operator with an Indian accent, said Miriam Nelson, who helps run Aon Consulting's center.

"In India, the operators are doing a lot of the courtesies they are trained to do," Ms. Nelson said, but they often miss the nuance of conversations. She added that some Indian call centers show their operators episodes of "Seinfeld" and "Friends" to teach them about American culture.

Nothing on television, though, can prepare an Indian operator for chatty American consumers who like to talk about the ups and downs of the New York Yankees or the latest blizzard in Chicago.

Perhaps inevitably, monitoring is also moving offshore. HyperQuality, which is based in Seattle, has 100 call monitors in New Delhi who eavesdrop on call center workers around the United States. Those raters, oceans away, are trying to make sense of hot lines and hotheads, too.

rant continued and appended, motherfucker

You know, there were times at Yale when i felt hijacked. When my freshman year roomate started referring to university employees by racial slurs within hours after imet him, and peed on my floor and on new haven, i felt hijacked. When Yale "lost" the diversity grievance, the 77 undergrad complaints against Levin, and any semblance of commitment to a better New Haven, i felt hijacked. When Yale-backed Rev. K. called up black voters in the hill and told them Dolores Colon and the puerto ricans were trying to take the ward away from them, i felt hijacked. When Alek Felstiner and thomas Frampton were threatened with arrest for leafletting on parents' weekend, i felt hijacked. When John Stepp was fired, and when Brian Tunney came back to the table time and time again with no new proposals, i felt hijacked. When Yale put 10,000 in medical debt and put liens on a thousand houses, i felt hijacked. When they funded the sudanese civil war and privatization schemes in Argentina and Indonesia and colorado and california I felt Hijacked. When Levin told us we weren't representative students and told Thomas he was close minded only months after trying to have him arrested, i felt hijacked. When Dick Brodhead emailed 5500 undergrads to tell us we should feel free to cross picket lines, i felt hijacked. When yale subcontracted the Anylan Center and the art gallery and LC and Swing Space and Sprague Hall (took me forever to remember the name of that building) I felt hijacked. When Yale did nothing after Kat Lo's room was broken into with 2x4s by angry jingoistic fratboys until we stormed woodbridge, and ultimately let off the perpetrators with a slap on the wrist and then tried to suspend Thomas Frampton for no reason, i felt hijacked. When my school paid an anti-union law firm millions and used fear and intimidation tatctics and repression against its own students to deny them a voice in their work, you can fucking bet i feld like i'd been hijacked. When they said they were "better than democracy" i felt hijacked. When they gave Zaccagnino the alumni of the year award two months after the med debts troy broke, i felt hijacked. When mike morand led a picket line of rich people, managers, YCC assholes, Dan Kruger, and subcontracted workers who had no idea where they were going or why against the board of aldermen as they voted to call on Yale to be an equal partner, i felt hijacked. When i watched hospital cops arrest four workers for trying to leaflet about a strike vote to their co-workers, i felt hijacked. And when Wiliam Sledge attacked a student in the YDN for doing his job well and in good faith, i felt hijacked. When rich assholes put up those racist anti-union flyers during the March strike, i would have felt hijacked but i was too busy kicking Yale's ass. All those times we stood outside in the rain or snow while they celebrated themselves inside with llamas (free the fucking llamas!) or Skip Gates, i felt hijacked. When Claudia Merson told me "you're not helping" as i was dragged around by a chain on my neck by a slick-haired, suited, cigar puffing Yale as i wore disheveled clothing and held a big sign that said "New Haven," i felt hijacked. When Rick levin did nothing after 675+ arrests, i felt hijacked. When they locked two hundred people out of the town meeting on grad student unionization, i felt hijacked. When the building manager at 55 whitney tried to arrest us for trying to bring sandwiches and pepsis to hungry retirees, i felt hijacked. When they spent $80,000 to demonize a local preacher and alumnus vying for a seat at the table, i felt hijacked.



But when i was working with the federation? With the UOC? No, I was never hijacked.



I was proud.



And i feel extraordinarily privileged to have been able to participate in that movement.



I was going to conclude this with a simple "go fuck yourself," but the hours that have passed since i first read the herald peice have blunted the ferocity of my rage if not its depth. Nevertheless, i am still incensed by its arrogance and presumptiveness. But if we beat Yale, we can beat the Francis Mentons and Jamie Kirchicks of the world too, so Mountain, get the fuck out of my way.



Rant concluded, for now.



Super Special Contest: Can You Think of Times When Yale Hijacked Your Life? Talk about it in the comments section! Remember to leave your name if you want!

i just lost a long post about Yale and hijacking. I'll try to ressurect it later, but right now i'm way too angry with blogger.

while i'm blogging about Yale stuff for no reason...

Compare this Yale Police Panegyric to Paige Austin's piece on the YUPD and racial profiling in the New Jounal last year, and see which one is more implausible. I think you know my answer. It's a shame that the Herald has lax enough editorial standards to print something this vapid and badly researched, and this is just about the most elitist, patronizing piece of screed since Kirchick meticulously detailed the quivering lips of union scabs. God forbid Yale workers should stand up to a boss that has treated them like dirt for sixty years, and against which everything they've won, they've won on a picket line. God forbid Bobby Proto should oppose retaliatory layoffs when the university's endowment jumps 20%. I mean, what a greedy union bureaucrat, proctecting workers' jobs. "Yale workers allow young minds..." - what a crock of shit! Yeah, Yale works because they do - so because you claim to acknowledge the importance of their work to letting you sit on your ass, that means you have the right to dictate what they should think about their elected leadership to them? Thank god for you! Have you ever talked with a dining hall worker about the strike? And finally,

Let me be clear, I don't plan on joining the Undergraduate

Organizing Committee anytime soon. Yale's workers should be treated well, but

the students who support striking workers at Yale are also making themselves

political pawns for the union leadership, specifically Local 35 President Bob

Proto and John Wilhelm, TC '67, leader of the national Hotel and Restaurant

Workers Union. I fully believe that these men hijacked the livelihoods of Yale's

workers and students to advance political ambitions.

I'm glad you think that Yale workers should be treated well. I think that Yale should negotiate with its workers and students as partners rather than as pawns or lessers, and the only way that has ever happened is when Yale's workers and the New Haven community took the kind of action you condemn as self-interested. (And before you make proclamations about whether or not Yale workers are mistreated, try talking to some. Better yet, try working in a dining hall or at durfees and trying to figure out why you haven;t recieved any of your last three paychecks, or why your supervisors are shouting racial epithets at you as you try to clean an elevator floor.) As a founding member of the undergraduate organizing committee and as a former staff member of the "Hotel and Restaurant Workers Union," i'll tell you flat out that none of us are or were hijacked, and to intimate otherwise is profoundly disrespectful. Why is it that when you insult working people, you're independent and rational, and when we criticize the university for arresting, intimidating, and firing its own employees for union activity, we're political pawns? Fuck you!



The workers and students i marched with on the picket lines during the two strikes of 2003 knew exactly why we were out there - to build new kinds of enriching relationships between eachother and the university that Rick Levin had spent the last three years trying to stop us from making, to win organizing rights for all workers at Yale, to desegregate Yale's job structure and force the university if necessary to start hiring Latinos and create training programs for unskilled workers which would give people who'd given yale their entire lives a chance to move up the ladder, to make it clear to Levin and the corporation that we would not tolerate a system in which Yale forced workers to retire into poverty. After the settlement that spetember, the workers i talked to were overjoyed. The atmosphere outside the center church on the green was almost carnivalesque after the ratification vote. You claim that workers must have learned by now that they have poor leadership. i think what they learned form the strike is that when they are strong and when they are together and when they strategize and combine militant organizing with research and broad, innovative, community organizing, they can beat a $12 billion dollar corporation. I know that's what i learned at Yale. And i won't ever let you or anyone else "hijack" that.

bus strikes, Geso, Josh, Death squads

The second private bus line strike in queens in under three years - you'd thing someody would learn something. Oh wait, what am i saying? (Speaking of which, the YDN eats crow, which is always fun to watch, even when you haven't been in new haven in like four months.



Meanwhile

To remedy New Haven crime increases, Mayor John DeStefano Jr.

said he will focus on addressing incidents of larceny and murder, both of which

increased in the city in 2004. The city statistics show murders nearly doubled,

from eight in 2003 to 15 in 2004.Most of these cases are unrelated and not

attributable to a single individual, New Haven Police spokeswoman Bonnie

Winchester said in an e-mail. "With the exception of the two homeless people who

were murdered in an abandoned building on Grand Avenue, I don't believe that any

of the murders are related," she said

Well, i guess if they're homeless, they must not matter at all. Off to the glue favtory with 'em, clearly.



Good column, Josh



Meanwhile, Newsweek reports that the DOD, rife with Rumsfelds, Negropontes, and Cheneys riding high on the Veep's declaration during the VP that paramilitary killing squads in El Salvador symbolized the "human cry for freedom," mulls bringing back the death squad as a means of pacifying Iraqis. Noone should be surprised. Everyone should be very, very angry.

the good: the mets just signed the "premier" free agent on the market, Carlos Beltran. (God, that terminology is disturbing.) Walter Johnson's next book in the making...)



The bad. GM Omar Minaya celebrates by having breakfast with the Bushes... Fan-fucking-tastic.

while i'm on the subject of music i want but cannot find, if you have the wrens' secaucus, i will love you forever if you burn me a copy.

i walked into barnes and noble tonight, and i saw reaction. And it was ugly.

what happened to songs about vikings and satan?

one metal band does a moby dick-inspired concept album, another takes on Foucault's reading of Bentham.



And they aren't even Swedish.



What's the world coming to?

"New York Life type trife the roman empire state"

That's a quote from the end of Talib Kweli's verse on "Respiration." I heard someone quote it today while walking past the new Time Warner center on 59th, a glitzy mall for the CPW set, and it seemed appropriate.



I am trying to find a copy of the MIA/Diplo mixtape Piracy Funds Terrorism Vol 1. If you know how i can get a copy of this thing, please lemme know. Thanks.



I Roy kicked ass.

Nathan Newman looks at colonial violence, the racism of imperial historiography, and the cold war.

The savage African, the trope of global racism, was carefully nurtured by

European and American writers for centuries. In the mid-20th century, the Kenyan

Mau Mau rebellion was pictured as the epitome of this brutal savagery, so much

so that when the trope of African savagery was borrowed to indict the black

power movement in the US, writers like Tom Wolfe would borrow the image in his

famous piece Radical

Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers...

Policing Subway Photography

Mortimer L. Downey, the authority's executive director from 1986 to

1993, said the value of the ban might lay primarily in giving the police more

leeway in questioning people with criminal motives.

"The likelihood that

you're going to catch a terrorist taking pictures is fairly slim, but

conceivably you might, and it's certainly better to catch him taking a picture

than blowing up a station," he said.

So i guess that whole due process crap is just kind of "over," like slap bracelets and the Geneva conventions?

Not long ago, Mr. Vergara recalled, he was photographing pigeons

that had entered the Broadway Junction station in eastern Brooklyn, where five

subway lines meet. "Somebody just put out the word - and this is one of the

large stations that have police 24 hours," he said. "They went looking for me.

They caught up with me."

Two policemen, Mr. Vergara said, asked him what he

was doing. "I said, 'Well, taking pictures of pigeons here.' That didn't sound

very believable."

While Mr. Vergara tried to convince the policemen that his

photography was legitimate, another passenger began taking snapshots of the

photographer being questioned. That annoyed the officers, in Mr. Vergara's

account: "Right after they were done with me, they told me, 'We're going after

him.' "

Yup, no civil liberties being violated here!

This is not what you had planned

Apologies, first, for the abyssmal posting of late. I've been preoccupied and frustrated and not sure how to write about it in a way which wouldn't just seem ridiculous. I also have been not doing a great job of being honest with myself about what i've been going through. First, I'm worried about my dad, whose heart medication somehow induced "complications" last week wherein he found himself urinating blood. I haven't heard from my brother in a week, so i guess i'm worried about him too. I'm worried about an old friend who may or may not have been in Indonesia during the Tsunami who i have no idea how to get in touch with. I'm selfishly worried about how much my applications sucked and what i'm going to do for the next eight months and what i'm going to do after that, but that seems trivial. And i'm worried that i'm just going to hole myself in my parent's apartment again and hate my life, which still seems pretty trivial compared to what everyone else is going through. (And at the risk of sounding like some Reaganite voluntarist, the very simple answer is that i just don't do this.)



I went to the dentist for a routine cleaning yesterday and it turns out that the acid reflux crap eroded my teeth and i have to give myself a flouride treatment every day for possibly forever and couldn't i just drink tapwater instead?



I don't really feel like writing anything else right now. I'm really apretty mediocre blogger. Go watch the live video of The Advantage's take on the theme music from the Flashman stage of Megaman 2. It will make me feel better.

Hartford Connecticut kicks (Walmart's) ass.

I'm out $220, but my applications are in. If i could keep my fingers crossed for four months, i would.

Vote, Dammit

Elaine's behind by about 60 votes. Go vote for her, and may the schwartz be with you.

"troglodytes"

I'm kind of speechless on this one.

well, fuck

Steve Greenhouse article on the right-wing agenda of bush's NLRB

"All the cases that we've decided have been well reasoned,"

Mr. Battista said. "They're certainly consistent with the act. I wouldn't

characterize them as pro-business or pro-union. I'd like to say they're

pro-employee."

Vin Petrini couldn't have said it better!

The board's defenders say it is merely continuing a long tradition

of swinging back and forth: toward management when a Republican is in the White

House and toward labor during Democratic presidencies.

"After eight years of

a liberal Clinton board and an extremely liberal general counsel, there is of

course going to be some turning back toward a conservative agenda," said Randel

Johnson, vice president for labor, immigration and employee benefits at the

United States Chamber of Commerce. "The board has turned a corner here, but it's

not a wholesale reversal of the case law in favor of the business

community."

Several recent board decisions, Mr. Johnson pointed out, have

reversed Clinton-era rulings that overturned precedents set by Republican

boards. In a case involving I.B.M., the board voted 3 to 2 to overturn a Clinton

board ruling that gave nonunion workers the right to have a colleague accompany

them to investigative or disciplinary meetings with supervisors. The Clinton-era

ruling was a reversal of a 1980's decision.

In a case involving Brown

University, the board reversed a Clinton-era ruling involving New York

University - a reversal of a 1970's decision - that gave graduate student

teaching assistants the right to unionize.

Mr. Battista said, "What we did

restores the precedent that has been time-honored and had never been overturned

by a court or by Congressional action."

The bush administration: slowly turning the clock back on workers' rights to the 1800s, one dceade at a time, and damn proud of it.

But the board's Democratic members vigorously objected. "The

issues raised by the petitioners were settled 40 years ago," they wrote. "To

revisit it serves no purpose but to undermine a principle that has been endorsed

time and again by the board and the courts."

***

Charles Craver, a professor of labor law at George Washington

University, said the board's conservative tilt would hurt unions, but less so

than the conservative tilt of the federal judiciary, which he said was

increasingly unfriendly to labor.

"I think we have a labor board as

conservative as any time since the Reagan board," Professor Craver said. "It

really troubles me because we're revisiting a lot of cases that have been fairly

well settled."

Wait - what happened to the Bush Administration's crusade against an activist judiciary which throws out precedent in favor of politics? Oh wait, "reality based-community." I remember now. How silly of me.