"And your silence is all to no avail; today the blinding sun of torture is at its zenith; it lights up the whole country. Under that merciless glare, there is not a laugh that does not ring false, not a face that is not painted to hide fear or anger, not a single action that does not betray our disgust, and our complicity."

-Sartre, Preface to Franz Fanon's The Wretched Of The Earth.

Urgent: UOC Sit-In at the Admissions Building!!! (Who Needs Woodbridge Anyway?)

14 undergraduates have entered Yale's Admissions building just after 10 AM this morning. They are now sitting in indefinitely to demand that the university commit to significant reductions of both the Student Contribution and the Family Contribution components of its financial aid structure.

You can support them by calling (203 432 2550) or emailing (richard.levin@yale.edu) Yale's President, Richard C. Levin, and tell him to listen to the voices of over a thousand students who've backed the UOC's platform and make Yale a leader on this issue, on which it now lags significantly behind Princeton and Harvard.

Phoebe and others are liveblogging the sit-in. I will hopefully have updates here as well. Please take action now.

Financial Aid Statistics Comparing Yale, Harvard, and Princeton:
Percentage of undergrads receiving financial aid:Yale - 40%Harvard - 48%Princeton - 52% (in the class of 2008)
Average grant package (per year):Yale - $22,000Princeton - $26,100 (for the class of 2008)Harvard - $28,000
Average debt at graduation:Yale - $16,000Harvard - $8,830
Self-help contribution (for one academic year):Yale - $4,200Harvard - $3,500Princeton - approx. $2,500
Change in numbers of applicants for the class of 2009:Yale - (-)1.2%Harvard - (+)15%Princeton - (+)17%

And the anti-worker agena you rode in on...

NYC says no to Wal-Mart

The decision by the developer, Vornado Realty Trust, is a blow to Wal-Mart,
the world's largest retailer, and comes after company officials said that New
York City was an important new frontier in which Wal-Mart was eager to
expand.

nice cartoon.

it's about time

Six Feet Under season three is finally making it to DVD. It's the only season i haven't seen any of. If it's anywhere near as good as season two, i'll be happy.

one pill makes you stronger, one pill hopefully kills the evil bacteria in your stomach

Two weeks and 112 pills later, the antibiotic course is finally over. Hopefully it worked and i won't have to do this again, both because i hate the GI Doctor's office and the way the receptionist looks at me whenever i go in there, and because these pills fuck up my digestive system and are a pain in the ass to remember to take.

For all the Yale folks, i hope the Levin forum goes/went well...

So, does the fact that a racist reactionary like Samuel Huntington, or an outspoken imperialist like Njiall Ferguson (that British Empire worked real well in Pakistan and Palestine, buddy) supports Larry Summers help him or just throw dirt on the grave of his tenure as president?

shoot to kill, come back and you're a veteran/(but how many veterans are out there peddling?)

The NYT today actually has a balanced and well written piece about soldiers and hip hop in the continued occupation of Iraq. Check it out.

Four Songs About Phone Numbers (in pseudoChronological order)

Wilson Pickett - "634-5789"
Tommy Tu-Tone - "Jenny (867-5309)"
B52s "606-0842"
The Wowz - "646"

Ten Songs I Would Be Listening To Right Now If Right Now Was 11th Grade

Jaco Pastorius, "Come On, Come Over"
Charles Mingus, "Group Dancers"
Jimi Hendrix, "Third Stone From The Sun"
Sonic Youth, "Teen Age Riot"
Miles Davis, "John McLaughlin"
Charles Mingus, "Hora Decubitus"
Wes Montgomery, "Four On Six"
The Pixies, "Hey"
The Clash, "I'm Not Down"
Lauryn Hill, "Everything Is Everything"

(I still listen to all of these.)

i am trying to break your heart

A clarification: the long entry i wrote about organizing and sophomore year and Local 100 was intended as a means for me to talk about why that internship was powerful. I went back to the beginning of the Fall 2001 semester because there was a continuity, in terms of my frustrations about organizing, that i think was somewhat separate from anything that i'd encountered the previous year, even during those conversations with katie and stephen and others. I am not trying to overstate my importance to the UOC, which is what i am afraid the entry could be read as, but instead to talk about how i arrived at the point where i was able to do the organizing that i did, regardless of how successful that was.

I forgot to talk about September 11 and its legacies, which were extremely important for Local 100 and for the RA contract victory - 43 Windows on the World employees, members of the union, were killed in the flames which consumed 1 WTC. The company argued that it could not afford to pay workers a living wage and brandished the threat of its clients moving to New Jersey - a somewhat unique manifestation of the race to the bottom in the financial service sector which Saskia Sassen analyzed in The Global City. I wasn't in New York when the planes hit, i was in New Haven, as i have written elsewhere on this blog. Working with Local 100 was both overwhelming and inspiring. From the ashes, and having suffered unimageinable losses, the union was fighting for the rights of immigrant workers demonized as potential terrorists and security risks in the wake of the bombing and the bush administration's barely cloaked jingoism.

I also think that I just blocked out the whole YCC Card Check orgy of arrogance. I don't really want to think about those six hours, or any of the YCC assholes responsible for them, ever, ever again. So i'll just say that I sat near Katie and Michael Denning and i seethed. A lot. And then they tried to kick Lis out of the room. And no one would listen to Steve Fortes. Oh god, it was disgusting.

watched Garden State, finally. Not bad. Ending is contrived - and see my earlier observations about airports.

Natalie Portman is very good. Which confirms my hypothesis that Attack of The Clones was entirely George Lucas's fault

El Penguino Revisited/A tale of 6 Abbey/Abi/Abby/Abbi/Abbies

I started my second year of college fresh from Mogillon Rim birdnappings and a brief bizarre stay in Phoenix's Sky Harbor International Airport. I was excited about continuing and immersing myself in the organizing i'd started to get involved in in the last three months of the previous semester, finding a community of people i felt at home with and a means of changing, i thought, all the things about Yale that were making me miserable. Very quickly, things turned kind of sour.

In part, this was because of September 11 and the political climate on campus in its immediate aftermath, though the October 5th candlelight march was incredible. But a lot of it had to do both with my failure to be an effective organizer and with USAY's own organizational failures. Hours after i'd first gotten involved with what people were then calling the "student union," i sat down with Katie and Stephen and Abi and they told me about all the conflict the student union people had created over the seven or so months they'd been organizing. I got involved because i wanted to fight for real change at Yale, but also on some level because i thought i could act as some sort of bridge, that i could reform USAY from the inside. This was extraordinarily naive and obnoxious of me.

During FOCUS, when some USAY people were putting together flyers for incoming students, one of them asked me to go find another student, who'd been active in agitating for financial aid reform, so that she could be photographed for the flyer and talk about her experience on financial aid. Problem was, i learned, this person wasn't on financial aid, and it seemed odd that such had been the assumption, primarily because the woman in question was African-American. This would foreshadow, for me, larger problems in how USAY interacted with other organizations on campus. I'm tempted to blame F&T for this, though i share culpability in that i was unable to make any real changes, and my organizing conversations were falling apart before my eyes.

By the beginning of November, i felt like my organizing had failed. I don't think i really understood how to do what i wanted to do, how to get my organizing to where i wanted it to be, how to really have an organizing conversation, how to really build power. My organizing "failed" because i didn't understand what i was doing and because i couldn't figure out how to push people, how to help folks move forward. USAY, meanwhile, had seemingly decided to concentrate its organizing efforts on YCC reps, which, i thought, was a complete dead-end and recipe for obsolescence. The cultural houses and the Co-Op were, for the most part, disgusted (though Abbey and a few others were working hard to build a new relationship between student labor folks and the various organizations arising from the cultural centers even then, and later cooperation with the Women's Center PAC was also very fruitful.) My conversations with Alek were mostly shouting matches in various dining halls around campus. (Sorry man.) At the mid-november membership meeting, the organization backed a platform i didn't really get and wasn't particularly excited about. I felt completely useless, so i left, which i should not have done, despite hard pushes from Abbey, who urged me to change things by building committee. She was right of course, but it took me a long time to learn how to do that. (In part, i left because of my attempts to cling to an idealized orthodox anarchism. I also didn't trust several people on the committee - particularly the guy who later went off to work with the CIA.)

I returned to student labor organizing a month and a half later, when Abi and some others tried to restart SLAC as the contract officially expired and the interest-based bargaining process dragged on. I stayed relatively involved in the SLAC stuff, though i disappeared for two weeks because i was mad at Abbey and Abby at one point, and i wasn't involved at all in the "Social Contract" meetings, which i seriously regret. But if i made it to meetings pretty frequently, I didn't really do much for most of the semester, because i was deeply depressed and felt like i had nothing to contribute.

A couple things brought me back - in no particular order these were ongoing informal conversations with Katie, who actually suceeded in getting me back into a USAY meeting, taking Michael Denning's Strikes In Twentieth Century History and Culture graduate seminar with a room full of GESO steering committee members (and the union's current chair,) and watching movies like Salt of The Earth, Norma Rae, Tout Va Bien, and Man of Iron, (you try watching Salt of The Earth and not wanting to organize!) deciding that someone really needed to organize Julie and Zoe, and the GSA Town Hall meeting on unionization, with Anita, Bobby, and Michael Denning speaking in favor of the union and Susan Hockfield, Ian Shapiro, and an anti-union graduate student speaking against. Although Yale did everything they could to limit the amount of people who could be in the room, hundreds of GESO members showed up, including over a hundred who were locked out of the room. The energy inside was powerful, as graduate teachers and researches directly challenged Hockfield to give concrete answers to all the crucial questions to which she artlessly attempted to give insultingly effusive responses.

So i started organizing again, doing massive litdrops to try to get students to the April 24 "Equal Partnership" action, running up and down all the entryways of three colleges and slipping leaflets under every door, though i still wasn't ready to actually have an organizing conversation with someone. April 24th was powerful for many reasons, even if i missed the celebration afterwards because i had to write a paper about fredric jameson. F&T marched in with the drill team and the crowd parted to let them through and K spoke and we owned college street and people looked on and waved from the sidewalk and from The Anchor and from fucking Hot Tomato's and perhaps for the first time, i felt powerful.

I decided that i wanted to work with HERE that summer, and F&T hooked me up with the union's east coast recruiter. Between when i went home and when Connie Holt called me to tell me they had a spot for me with Local 100, a friend from high school and middle school passed away after a long battle with cancer. L's death came as a shock to me and many other friends, because the last we'd heard the cancer was in remission and she was going to be able to go back to school. Instead, three months after her twentieth birthday, we found ourselves at her funeral. L and i were never that close, but she was someone i had a great deal of admiration for, and someone i liked a lot. Every day after school she, with her little brother S, was an integral part of the group of us who'd walk down Manhattan College Parkway, through Brust Park, and down 242nd street to the train station and the bus stop. (This was where we said our goodbyes, since she took the bus to the Bronx neighborhood where her family lived, and i took the 1-9 train the ten miles to the upper west side.) I was devastated. The funeral was more a celebration of who L was than a straightforward outpouring of grief and pathos, though there was a great deal of grief, and the admixture of emotion which hung low in the pentecostal church over our heads was palpable, tangible. But the Mennonite reverend who led the ceremony, and all of L's family members and friends spoke of how L lived her life, and of how she battled against the cancer and found the stregnth to face it. I left the funeral on the subway with a bunch of people from high school i hadn't seen in years. We ate a very somber lunch at the pizzeria on 86th and broadway next to the tasti-d-lite and said our goodbyes. I went home and tried to process what i was feeling - my grief and my rage and my feelings of powerlessness and frustration and loss, and my deep guilt at the fact that i hadn't visited L when she was in the hospital, that I hadn't seen or spoken to her in years.

For a while, i just retreated into Television and the internet and tried not to think, because it was too hard, too sad. But eventually i started to mull over the words that the mennonite reverend had said about Lauren. And i thought about my own life. And i felt like something needed to change.

There was a one-week training in Litchfield Connecticut for all the folks doing HERE internships that year. I had to miss my little bro's high school graduation, but in return i learned how to organize. (Thanks, Steve Matthews.) I learned about the food service industry and how to strategically put pressure on universities. We watched Subtext (my second time) and the Frontier Strike video (we all started crying) and then Andrea and Rev. Lee came and talked to us about the Yale fight, and i got really excited.

Working with Local 100 for the next month, there were moments when i considered not returning to Yale, staying in New York and trying to stay on with the union, as the Secretary Treasurer jokingly told me i should. I ultimately decided that the Yale fight, with emerging revelations of involvement in the sudanese civil war, the firing of John Stepp, and reports of secretaries staging lots of kick ass walk ins on their managers, was too important to walk away from. I'll get back to that in a minute.

While i would later be unable to quantify what working with the local meant to me to Janice and Brian in Boston, i want to take the space to do so here. When i got to Local 100, they were in the prcess of wrapping up a major contract victory against Restaurant Associates, a Compass subsidiary. I didn't get to do much actual organizing - a lot of copying, a lot of logistical work, though i did go on a few house visits, including one where a guy threatened to get "real ignorant" on us and we talked him down and got him to bring a card in to the house for the woman we were trying to see to sign, and a lot of shop visits. What was powerful for me was seeing victory for the first time, was talking to the workers on the Goldman Sachs committee and in the bowels of Rockefeller Center about how they'd won, was seeing a sucessful card check and stealing the cork from the champagne bottle to bring back to New Haven and show everybody that yes, card checks were real and they worked and we were going to have several of them eventually, and we were going to win. I carried the cork in my pocket to the first meetings of what became the undergraduate organizing committee, after i'd decided that i would come back, and i would come back to organize. When i was arrested on September 25, 2002, the cork was with me, as it was on March 6, 2003, when we led a 500 undergrad-strong student walkout in the middle of a snowstorm and created a new vision of undergraduate education together with thousands of workers and members of the New Haven Community.

Did i mention i love snow?

Bunch of things i'm happy about today:
Hanging out with Ana and Noah (and seeing Noah before he leaves for Argentina.)
Going to Baluchi's with Ana and Jia-Lynn.
Finding a copy of Piracy Funds Terrorism, Vol 1. at Kim's.
Learning that there is now a Criterion Collection DVD of Godard's incredible meditation on soixante-huit, Tout Va Bien, and acquiring a copy.

I'm So Bored With The USA/Career Opportunities

I'm grappling with the label Americanist and the discipline of American Studies. This, of course, after i've already applied to American Studies graduate programs. Katie has jokingly referred to me by the aforementioned moniker, while i have, more or less by a sort of linguistic default and a desire to take as many classes with Michael Denning as was humanly possible, chosen to affiliate myself with the also aforementioned discipline. These things are, i would argue, not the same. The term "americanist" conjures, for me, perhaps unfairly, images of old white men bent over arcane biographies of dead white capitalists and rulers, and evokes the particular historiographic trajectory of American Exceptionalism, Frederick Jackson Turner-style. Perhaps this is a general dissatisfaction with the paradigm of "Area Studies," perhaps i'm uncomfortable with the proprietary and constituent subtexts of the -ist suffix, not to mention its connotations of subscription, of belief, though this never seems to apply when discussing, say, South Asianists, or those wacky Latin Americanists.

I'm uncomfortable with the notion that American Studies should confine itself to the political boundaries of the US, and yes, i'm aware of all the problematics involved in the very important questions of whether and how theory can travel and the particular political stakes of American academics in American Studies Departments in the US talking about a hemispheric american studies and/or fetishizing hybridity and transnationalism without understanding the politics and consequences of the ways in which race and class and gender and place and citizenship and access to funding and publication and academic job security act upon its articulation. I want to do work that challenges the hegemony of the nation, wrestles with the many questions concerning empire, colonialism, and the production of subjectivity extant in American Studies, and i'm not sure how to do this yet. Or whether i should drop everything, learn Urdu or arabic, shift focus to another corner of the globe, and not be "an Americanist" any more. Though i'd be a little behind the 8-ball on that one. And i should probably learn Urdu and Arabic anyway, because the histories of South Asia and the Middle East weigh on what American Studies should be. I'm not happy with these last two sentences. They're very problematic. I apologize.

And meanwhile, every job they offer me's to keep me on the docks. Which is to say they offer me no jobs.

Match up i would pay to see: Larry Summers vs. Buffy Summers. Not because Larry Summers would ever stand a chance in hell, if Buffy Summers were real and not a film and television character, but more because of all the juicy feminist irony involved and because Larry Summers kind of reminds me of the really ugly demon in the sewers that Buffy electrocutes in season 3. I'm shutting up. Now.

By the way, Alek, you are so wrong that you have no kneecaps. I am wondering how you can live with no kneecaps.

This entry has been brought to you by the letter B, The Clash's The Clash (like you needed help figuring that one out,) Malek Alloula's The Colonial Harem, Phoebe's excellent entry on the Summers controversy, and the Buffy The Vampire Slayer episode where the love spell misfires and she gets turned into a rat.

In my dream last night, honorable benjamin goldman healey (D-1) snuck up behind me when i was talking to someone, and, with an impish grin, chopped off a large amount of my hair in an asymmetrical pattern from the back of my head. I was very upset about this until i realized i needed a haircut anyway.

Make of this what you will.

Yale breeds social darwinism, apparently

i had ten things i was going to post today - about larry summers' remarks, now made public, about Buffy The Vampire Slayer and feminist sexual politics (it's been said before and by much smarter people, i'm sure), and about what working with Local 100 three summers ago meant for me and the organizing that i have done. That last one i'll still write someday soon. And if i convince myself it's worth it, maybe you'll even have to sit through me revisiting my anti-summers rage. (Blog Question of the day - more evil corporate university aristocrat: Summers, Zedillo, or Levin?) At one point i think i was even considering writing about Ben and offering a hypothesis somewhat different from the one Josh has made in several places over the past three or four months, but then decided not to.

The job search is going real slowly. Maybe i just need to falsify my resume so i look like i hate capitalism a little less than i actually do. Nah, i'm too lazy to be a decent liar.

OMFG

I'm left speechless.

(Except to say that BDP's "Jimmy" and A Tribe Called Quest's "Bonita Applebum" should clearly be on the list. (The latter for the lyric "And if you need 'em, i got crazy prophylactics.")

alright, apparently we're all terrorists.

color me disgusted. And don't tell them where i live

these guys really are complete morons.

Valentine's Day was uneventful and rainy. I walked 8 miles and did little else. Valentine's Day's always been a big orgy of capitalist reification and emotional clusterfuck, but when most days are exactly the same as the ones preceeding them, it gets really frustrating. This weekend and the one before it were both great though. Hanging out with friends, bizarre encounters with people from high school i hadn't seen in half a decade, and possibilities, however dim, of employment all instill some hope that maybe i'll be able to salvage the rest of this crazy year.

I used to always enjoy reading the results and accompanying essays of the Village Voice's Pazz & Jop Poll. This year (though i had i been more attentive in previous years i am sure i would have felt similarly," i have an axe to grind with Robert Christgau, who sits atop the Voice's stable of music critics. [How the hell did the William Shatner-Ben Folds novelty album beat out Jean Grae, Summer in Abadon and The Black Album? How do the French Kicks trump C'mon Miracle? Are the critics the Voice polls really that lazy and self-satisfied? See below...] Christgau generally (in the Voice at least) favors soundbites over more developed analysis or exposition, so his essay accompanying the poll results in this week's VV is clearly meant to commemorate the importance of the voice's yearly ritual. Christgau purports to illumine for us less enlightened readers the politics of pop in this year of empire and torture and wardrobe/body armor malfunctions and electoral triumphalism, for is this not the role of the cultural critic?

Christgau is fatally arrogant. His quick dismissals and flighty appraisals sometimes grasp at more complex possibilities but all too often come up wanting. Yet nowhere is Christgau so wrong as when he attempts to critique hip hop. This is not news to many, who read Christgau's hagiographic gushing over the long island white-girl hip hop trio Northern State in the summer of 2002 only to discover, upon the release of their debut LP Dying In Stereo a derivative, half-assed expropriation of hip hop's tropes with no understanding of its complex dynamics, a ironic colonization of black working class cultural production by white suburbanites. One critic wrote "Northern State sound like suburban brats playing with Ghetto Barbies." Of course, much of the ire directed at the trio had its own problems - positing hip hop as inherently male, or resorting to formalism and feminist-bashing when these were more convenient than looking at Dying in Stereo as a sort of liberal minstrelsy. Northern State and Christgau and their critics tended to erase or minimize the seminal importance of a long line of women rappers of color, from Roxanne Shante and Salt and Pepa to Missy Elliot and Eve, from Foxy Brown and Li'l Kim to Jean Grae, Rah Digga, L-Boogie, and Bahamadia, to name a choice few. At the root of Christgau's championing of Northern State was an ignorant cynicism, or maybe cynical ignorance of, at the very least 'mainstream' hip hop, something which is, of course, far more polysemous and difficult to categorize than Christgau would have us believe with his cursory dismissals of Li'l Jon and the ubiquitous Usher single "Yeah!" Perhaps there are more "spaces" with far greater possibilities than Christgau is willing to admit or able to percieve lying in the culture he dismisses so flipantly as failed, as conniving pussy magnets or cultivated poses, in the "crunk" which he dismisses as nihilistic if necessary escape. You know you're in trouble when a bunch of cartoon characters have more intelligent things to say about Blueberry Boat than you do.
***
Valentine's day will suck. It will be less scatological than last year, but far lonelier. I will walk eight miles and try to ignore the window displays and couples necking. I have taken 40 pills and have 72 more to take. Today my stomach was constantly upset and it really sucked.

fucking damn crap hell

both sleater-kinney shows are already sold out. But i'm going to go see the Go! Team later in march. And i want to try to get tickets to the wrens show.

Date With Ikea II

I wonder what Anna the chatbot would say about this...

lights that flash in the evening/through a crack in the drapes

Last night i was asked about why i was so obsessed with The Replacements last year. I initially responded that my fascination stemmed from Westerberg's prowess as a songwriter and, perhaps the biggest mediocre-record critic-cliche about the Replacements ever, the uniquely earnest and bitterly honest voice in which Westerberg writes and sings, as true of "God Damn Job" and "Shiftless When Idle" as it is of "Bastards of Young," "Skyway," or "Can't Hardly Wait."

But there were other reasons. The most banal is that i love the guitar playing - Stinson, when sober and clean, was capable of wonderfully melodic lead work. I'm also a sucker for horn lines (see Crazy in Love, "Heart of The City," "Sexxx Laws," RJD2's "Ghostwriter," etc.) and "Can't Hardly Wait"'s little bursts, combined with Westerberg and Alex Chilton's guitar harmonies, approach the sublime.

But i think the major reason i latched onto Westerberg's work was because i was "graduat[ing] unskilled," with "dreams unfulfilled," because i needed "a god damn job," because i very much wanted someone to "hold my life" until I was "ready to use it," because i was wrestling with how to say "'i'm sorry' to an answering machine," because i'd shouted "fuck school," when school is replaced with a four-letter word beginning with "Y" innumerable times and because i've always loved songs about other songs ("i'm in love - what's that song? I'm in love with that song," Westerberg's tribute to Chilton.)

It feels extremely corny to say "his words spoke to me" or something like that, and there was never a perfect fit, and i find some of westerberg's stuff really problematic, and i love the stuff that i didn't relate to very much at all, and i was always extremely self conscious about equating myself to Paul Westerberg, and there's something deeply masculinist about it all. But there were moments when those six albums from Sorry Ma to Pleased To Meet Me felt like an eerie soundtrack to my life as i feared and sometimes hoped it would become.

Does that make any sense?

hate to say it, but it kind of reminds me of "Chikken Feet." Sorry, Christo and Jean-Claude.

I got an 8 out of 10 on the Norton Anthology of Literature 20th Century quiz, which i'm happy with given that i'm not a literature scholar and don't own the Norton Anthology. Answers i missed were "art for art's sake" and something about the former Irish Literary Theatre. Oh well.

i just applied for a job for which i don't quite meet the qualifications , but which is with a really exciting organization with whom i would love to work. Wish me luck.

The cafe i was at yesterday gave me a mocha when i asked for a hot chocolate. After i corrected them. I have this thing about making food service workers' lives rougher than they already are, especially in crowded-as-fuck cafes, so i just drank the mocha. I woke up at 4AM thinking that this was clearly a dumb idea. The Gates are pretty awesome.

Arthur Miller's dead, Hell freezes over at the YDN building, GESO is "mulling" a strike, and according to the YDN's photo caption department, Phoebe is in GESO. Go Phoebe.

Eventful day - and it isn't even noon.

Students or Cattle

watch Levin announce plans to introduce similiar technology to the Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Anyone entering 425 College Street, Book Trader, or Willoughby's on Grove Street will be summarily executed.



Seriously though, if this is the "cutting edge," can someone please slit my wrists with it?

more non-interactions with half remembered faces from various institutions with which i was once affiliated. The upper west side in a nutshell.

Last night on second avenue and sixth street i ran into a guy i went to high school with. Let's call him D. D and i were in the same math class in 7th and 8th grade, and then he went to public school for two years, and then came back in 11th grade. He and i were never particularly close, but when you are part of the same small collectivity (a grade of 120-130 people) for so long you tend to feel like you know someone better than you actually do, and we got into a lot of the same colleges and wound up moving as a mob at some of the "admit weekends" that private universities hold to try to convince prospective students that they aren't as right-wing, depressing, union-busting, or boring as they actually are. D went to a school in California i had decided was too isolated and apolitical for me, and I hadn't seen or thought about him in a very long time. (Ultimately, my choice came down to Yale and U. Chicago, both of which were in cities and at both of which i'd seen exciting sweatshop activism. I chose Yale at the last minute because i was a big dumbass. I'd tell you it all worked out in the end, but i don't have a job, i live with my parents, and there are carcinogenic bacteria in my stomach.) Seeing D on the street yesterday was odd. he used to be all east village druggy genius, now he's working for the city and he's gained like twenty pounds and seems mildly yuppidied in that public sector, Shonuesque kind of way. And of course i had to say "well, i was coordinating a boycott, and now i live with my parents." What in god's name was i thinking?"



On an unrelated note, i'm curious about the process by which one defines oneself as a pundit. Did david brooks wake up one day and say "i am a pundit, i want to spout inane oversimplifications and get paid big bucks for endless pages of worthless crap?" Does someone else have to brand one a pundit in order for one to have truly arrived in the hallowed halls of punditry? If i were to change the title of this blog to "the problem of pundit," would that make me a pundit (not that i want to be a pundit under any circumstances.) Do you get health care with that? Is Josh a pundit?



I like the Comets on Fire record much more on second listen than i did the first time i listened to it.

The H. pylori, the carcinogenic and ulcer-causing (in the long term) bacteria which infested the lining of my stomach this summer, remain in my stomach. The antiobiotics i took last summer seem to have failed. So now i have to take more antibiotics for twice as long. To paraphrase Scott Marks: "H. Pylori, get out of my stomach."



There is a show at 10 pm on tuesdays on channel 25 that is playing videos by the Bloc Party, Animal Collective, and Devendra Barnhart and the Futureheads and they are interviewing Le Tigre about pancakes and waffles.

Speaking of Ikea

Something grows in Red Hook

Quinientos

This is my five hundredth post at The Problem of Leisure (my 825th on blogger, and i have no idea how many posts i had on the old geocities blog before i took it down, but i like to commemorate these little milestones.) My mother's feeling a little better, which is good. I think i hurt my arm carrying groceries for her today, which makes me feel really weak. I have to go back to the GI doctor tomorrow morning. I fucking hate the GI doctor. Think happy thoughts. Vic called me Xaq today - the alternate spelling i invented for my name in seventh grade and which enjoyed prolific use through eighth grade. It took me back to the truck and woo ha and its been real and when DeVon kicked the shit out of Matt, Ms Locher making fun of Dan for being late and all those conversations with David Cruz about the sex pistols' reunion, Peter Royal thinking i was maladjusted, the big bump beneath the GWB and Ali dead-arming me when i told the lunchroom we were gettring dismissed at 1:15 because she thought i was lying and me and Yo delegating Bertsche to make clear our objections to rumored plots to introduce uniforms and snarfing jello in the back of the lunchroom next to the window with the X on it. And Phil B. trying to sell candy in math class. And Bill. And assuring Harlan i wasn't biting on him with the trenchcoat. I don't know why i'm writing about this, though it's certainly bizarre that it was almost a decade ago. I've known Victor for a really long time.



I had a lot of ideas for what i was going to post here - my own "picks" to compete with Alek's, or maybe i'd tell you that in addition to The Woods, i'm excited about the upcoming new Common album (produced by Kanye,)and the new Coup record, both of which are supposed to come out soon, and MIA's Arular, slated for a february release date. I also had a funny anecdote involving me asking her whether, if she were a prostitute, sting telling her "you don't have to sell your body to the night" would induce her to stop, (she didn't think it would) and the two of us conjecturing that Roxanne is really about Gordon Summers and Masculinity. I was going to revisit the list of political songs from last summer to make a new list for th3e next four years. (A hint - it wold prominently feature The Specials' "Dawning of a New Era." (From 1978's The Specials.))



I need to wake up in seven hours because i want to walk down to the GI doctor tomorrow morning, so i will say goodnight and dream of finding employment.



Hey, Sara's dad. Hey, Elizabeth's brother.



Also, Tom Tommorrow skewers David Brooks.

just like a woman

Having already said as much in a Harvard Crimson op-ed just after the Summers story broke, Stephen Pinker cashes in on his newfound political capital among the "moderate" right with this New Republic column. And indeed, Pinker "doesn't get it." Or if he does, he misrepresents what's really at stake here - his column is rife with bald assumptions utilizing the very things he claims Summers is misrepresented as having supported - namely the assumption of some kind of essentialized difference between 'the male' and 'the female.' Pinker, rather than ackowledge the gaps in his reasoning, instead seeks to mask them with flippant and pointless anecdotes "Anyone who has fled a cluster of men at a party debating the fine points of flat-screen televisions," and then uses the scare tactics of the racist right "fatwa" to brand us all as crypto-islamofascists in a move worthy of Daniel Pipes. The incestuous reference to one's own published work as textual justification for essentializing categorizations is hardly demonstrative of academic rigor. I doubt the intersex movement would appreciate being offered up as evidence of innate gender difference, and Pinker's argument that this is the case seems to miss the mark completely. Perhaps he should read some Judith Butler. That Pinker sees a tenure clock ordered around the "biological clock" of a presumptive male subject as somehow outside the separate possibility of the bogeyman of gender discrimination makes clear the set of assumptions he seems to be working with, and his fundamental failure or refusal to acknowledge the contingency of his own exalted position atop Harvard's lofty ladder.



In the end, Pinker concludes by employing the oversimplified assumtions of a psychologist about human nature based on a colonial construction of the primitive and the fundamental. In doing so, he (perhaps not so) ironically returns to very old tropes about women as irrational creatures of whim and furor consumed by emotion and incapable of the higher reason enjoyable only by white male patriarchs. And this is hardly surprising.

My mom has the flu and a temperature of 101. I have been doing some shopping for her and taking care of her.



I really hope i don't get sick though, as selfish as that sounds.



Other than that, i had a great weekend.

New York Cares.

Note: i'm not really very happy with this entry, but i'm posting it anyway.



Paul Banks is a liar. The subway is not a porno, it's an orgasm - sometimes jubilant and euphoric, sometimes languid and tortuous, but the important thing is that it, and this city by which Banks is "not impressed" remain, despite the gentrification, the militarization, histories of racialized police brutalization and enclosure, irreducible to the extended-stay tourist/williamsburg hipster's callow dismissal i read in the Interpol Song "NYC." Because when I think about New York i think about elevated riverside drive in the sunset and sledding children, i think about 500,000 people in the streets and banners hanging from the plaza hotel, i think about when we left school a 1PM that thursday in 11th grade to join the Diallo march in Brooklyn or October 22 1998. I think about watching Max Roach and Cecil Taylor destroy the corporate jazz festival on the steps of columbia university, i think about the time i walked sixteen miles around manhattan or all the times i walked up into the bronx and i think about watching 15,000 home health care aides shout down dennis rivera as Chuck Schumer, Al Franken, and Howard Dean, arbiters of failed liberal reason, watched in confusion. I think about rooftop iliads and all the lonely odysseys and don't even get me started on the aeneid. And if anyone mentions "Troy" i will go postal i swear.



My point (sorry) is that Banks' detatched scorn - whether intended as morriseyesque irony or emo testimony, rings empty for me. I've been fed up with new york plenty of times. But unimpressed? Nope. But maybe that's because i have nowhere else to go.



Oh. By the way. Any way you want it, that's the way you need it. Any way you want it.

Passing Me By/It don't take time for me to blow ya mind.

The West End Gate, a bar on 114th street and broadway which is mostly frequented by Columbia folks, has recieved the naples treatment - shut down for serving alcohol to minors. Back in 8th and 9th grade, a bunch of bands from my high school (Waple, The Laspees, and Solamente, to name a few - all three of which contributed members to one incarnation or another of these guys) used to play in a little room in their basement. (They did not serve us alcohol, to the best of my knowledge,) so despite the fact that i haven't been inside the place for about eight years, it has a lot of weird nostalgic value for me. (Hanging out on 114th street between sets watching rats run in between the parked cars and awkwardly trying to fit in...) Anyway, if theys stay closed for a while, they'll probably just get replaced by a Duane Greed or a starfucks, so i guess i hope they reopen soon...



It's been a good weekend. There's an increasing migration of various friends into New York, and i'm excited and happy about this. I've made some slow progress on the job search, but i also feel more confident about things and will find something soon. And i'm excited about two Sleater-Kinney shows in early March, (Not to mention The Woods on May 24.)



Coming Soon: a look at the Feb Issue of Anthropology News' arguments over the AAA's decision to not cross the San Francisco Hilton's picket lines.

Date With Ikea

taking cues from mcplunk, i decided to have some fun of my own with the Ikea ChatBot. I stuck to song lyrics. Pay attention: at the end, she totally endorses graduate student teacher and researcher unionization. I wouldn't make this up.

Me: You never give me your money

Anna: I'm an Online Assistant, not a cash dispenser. Let's talk about IKEA.

Me:i want you to want me

Anna: If you want affordable solutions for better living, you are at the right place.

Me: oh baby, you got what i need, but you say you're just a friend

A: I don't want to talk about families or children, sorry. Please let's talk about Children's Furniture and Accessories.

ME: Jay's like king midas, as i was told. Everything he touches turns to gold

A: For which product would you like to know what kind of materials it is made from?

Me :two years ago, a friend of mine asked me to say some MC rhymes

A; Sorry but I'm not clear on how that particular type of employment relates to IKEA products or services. Could you be more specific to an IKEA product or service?

Me: Back in the days on the boulevard of Linden, we used to kick routines and the presence was fittin'

A: Here you will find the Curtain Accessories.

Me: In our hands is placed a power greater than their hoarded gold, greater than the might of armies magnified a thousandfold. We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old, for the union makes us strong.

A: Here you will find back-to-school products!

Hilton pays the price for the lockout. (Note to the LA times - the lockout lasted seven weeks, not four days.)



And even the Bush NLRB finds that the LA Hotels' anti-worker tactics (unilaterally imposing increased worker health care costs) are illegal.

Parenting: The Alberto Gonzales method.

thank god those white men are there to protect the women of color from the men of color. And who would begrudge anyone some fun when gunning down civilians?

Ossie Davis, RIP

they want to dignify, analyze and terrorize you

off to the GI doctor again to see a man about some carcinogenic bacteria.



maybe this time they will let me through the fucking door.

return the gift

Alek has re-launched new plastic music, complete with a blog and music picks, comlete with Quicktime samples. If anyone is interested the only one i have is the Vaselines compilation, which is pretty awesome. Anyway, check it out.



I have been listening to a lot of music in the last few weeks - The Game's Documentary, soaked in Dre-produced nostalgia for the NWA era, Cam'Ron's intriguing Purple Haze, and pitchfork favorites Black Mountain, Archer Prewitt, and the cooperative venture between Bonnie Prince Billy and Chavez's Matt Sweeney, Superwolf. All are pretty good and you should check them out, though the music i'm really obsessing over right now is more predictable for people who've been reading this site with any semblance of consistency - The Clash, The Go! Team, Hüsker Dü, Sinic Youth, The Advantage, the Pixies, Gang of Four, Sleater-Kinney, Le Tigre, The Replacements, Pavement, The Coup, The Breeders, Jackie Mittoo, GBV, Charles Mingus, Camper Van Beethoven, The Fiery Furnaces, Mos Def, Mission of Burma, Tribe, The Arcade Fire, The Decembrists, The Shins (with reservations about possible Ayn Randianism,) Television, The Silver Jews, and a whole lot of other shit. Ah, fuck it, i'll shut up.



I am feeling like i am at the end of my rope and i have no idea what i'm doing. I feel pathetic and miserable and frightened and useless. I waste time prodigiously to avoid having to think about how i am using it, and it sucks and i want my life back. I'm on the verge of tears right now and i have been for weeks. And admitting this just makes me feel that much more disgusted with myself.

when the ITunes party shuffle puts Blonde Redhead's "Misery Is A Butterfly" right before Weezer's "butterfly," are they trying to fuck with my head?



Long Grain Rights really is fantatstic. And i was all psyched about the free show the wowz were going to play tonight, but it got canceled.



Julie, stop changing the title of your blog. I get confused very easily. I'm serious.

Camp Buccattica: Fun for the whole family!