Managing partner Patrick Oxford, who joined Giuliani at the
announcement, said the firm was seeking a New York office when it approached
Giuliani about seven months ago.
“The name Rudolph Giuliani,” Oxford said, “is
synonymous with strong and effective leadership.” Plans for the Bracewell &
Giuliani venture were revealed a few days before Thursday’s formal announcement
at The Waldorf-Astoria hotel, in midtown Manhattan.(NYDN)
That's funny. I associate the name "Rudolph Giuliani" with the murder of Amadou Diallo. i associate that name with the murder of Patrick Dorismond and the illegal leak of his police record to the media in a disgusting attempt to excuse the crime and depict his life as worthless. i associate Rudolph Giuliani with all those pictures of Abner Louima's brutalized face - his teeth broken from having the Plunger with which he was raped shoved down his throat - on that hospital bed. I also associate Rudy Giuliani with involvement in city workers' union election fraud aimed at keeping leadership amenable to the Giuliani vision of the theme park, safe for suburbanite city in power. I associate Giuliani with police tanks in tompkins square, LES community gardens destroyed to sate the greed of wealthy developers, the neoliberal city ruled at gunpoint, racial formations policed with repeating pistols. I associate Giuliani with political corruption, technocratic, arrogant, power, questionable use of public resources for private enjoyment, armed police officers patrolling the halls of public high schools, massive payoffs.The first political demonstration i ever went to was the October 22, 1998 march against police brutality, down Broadway from Union Square to City Hall. Because of the experience of growing up in Giuliani's New York, i started organizing. I wrote stuff in my school paper. I went to protests and marches. i wanted to get arrested and participate in civil disobedience. I tried to take over my student government. (Electorally, believe it or not.) I started an "anarchist collective." And then i wound up in New Haven, and saw a related but subtly different form of urban imperialism at work.The post-9/11 hagiographic rewriting of Rudolph Giuliani does a great deal of violence, and this is a violence directed precisely against those who suffered so much from Giuliani's policies the first time around.
"but my dreams, they aren't as empty as my pocket seems to be."Well, it makes a lot more sense than the original...
jl's account of the lohan incident makes it onto gawker Right between Nicky Hilton and Winona Ryder, who starred in mean girls back when it was called Heathers and was a much better movie.last thursday night was walking with a friend down essex b/t
Stanton and rivington when we noticed a bunch of movie trailers lined up along
the street. out of nowhere, lindsay lohan storms past us on the sidewalk with
four curlers in her hair and a really distressed look on her face. she was
wearing a white sweater, which contrasted with the sickly burnt-orange shade of
her skin. if mary-kate resembles a homeless munchkin, then (as my friend noted),
lindsay’s more like an oompa loompa.
Frank Black and Steve Cropper. Interesting.
Honeycomb features work from eminent studio musicians such as
keyboardist Spooner Oldham, guitarist Steve Cropper, and drummer Billy Block.
The album features 11 original songs from Black, including "Atom in My Heart",
"Another Velvet Nightmare" (co-written with Reid Paley), "Go Find Your Saint",
"Violet", "I Burn Today", and "My Life Is in Storage". The three covers that
round out the record are Doug Sahm's "Sunday Sunny Mill Valley Groove Day", Roy
Bennett and Sid Tepper's "Song of the Shrimp"-- which was made popular by Elvis
Presley in the film Girls, Girls, Girls-- and Dan Penn and Chips Moman's "Dark
End of the Street".
Happy birthday to Lev, who can now drink legally in this country and therefore should stop all the bourgie globe-hopping now. Also happy birthday to Amelia, who is not bourgie.
If they make a movie of Chloe Does Yale (which i actually read, as good a measure as any of how dismal my life is at the moment,) does Lindsay Lohan play Natalie Krinsky -- err, "Chloe Carrington?" I think she totally does.I really should be writing more on topic, but i've really been on a sort of hiatus of all things topical recently as i deal with the fallout of things i do not wish to advertise about myself on "the blogosphere." At some point i'll feel stable enough about my life and shit to be able to blog the way i want to, but right now i'm keeping things sporadic and light while i (yet again) attempt to pull myself together.
Earlier this evening, i was walking down Essex street with JL. Between Stanton and Rivington there were a series of very large trailers, the kind movie stars stay in when filming. I've seen enough NYC movie sets to know one. We were about to muse over the possible occupants of said trailers when a very perturbed Lindsay Lohan rushed down the street with an entourage of white guys dressed in black turtleneck sweaters. LL was all disheveled, with four curlers in her hair. She looked kind of like an anorexic pumpkin. Or maybe an oompa-loompa. Later, we stumbled onto the set of the movie - two big cranes suspended over a lower east side street.
Minnie Driver was much cooler.
just saw the rhythm guitarist and bass player for the Go! Team on sixth ave. Small city.
The sold-out Big Sleep/Mobius Band/Go! Team show at the Mercury Lounge last night was a hell of a lot of fun. Both opening bands were really tight, but it's the Go! Team's album i've been obsessed with for like five months, (which, if you haven't heard, you need to hear, like, now.) I wasn't sure how they'd sound live, because many of the songs involve a large amount of horn samples, and the live band has (sometimes) two drummers, a recorder, a melodica, a harmonica, at times two guitarists, sometimes a banjo, and a pretty awesome lead vocalist, but no horns. But the chaos on stage was energetic and fun and inspired. I have never seen a bunch of NYC indie rock kids participate in call and response song segueways or wave their hands in the air and sway back and forth. It was revelatory, in a happy, fun, kind of way. Anyway, if you haven't yet, you need to hear this band. I'm really glad i got the chance to see them live, and if they come back this way, don't pass up a similar opportunity, because they will blow you away.
By popular request:
This time, i'm looking for songs about telephones and phone calls. This should be a great deal less nebulous than last time, and i can think of millions of songs that qualify, so go crazy.
Five of my favorites, in no particular order:
1.The Replacements - "Answering Machine"
2.Blondie- "Hangin' On The Telephone," (or "call me," if you prefer)
3.Soul Asylum - "somebody to shove"
4.Sleater-Kinney - "Call The Doctor"
5.Husker Du - "Don't Want To Know If You Are Lonely"
Bonus/Iffy:The Specials, "Gangsters" ("Why must you record my phone calls/are you planning a bootleg LP,")
I walked by Dublin House on 79th street yesterday, the first day in nearly a week when i hadn't felt too sick to leave the apartment, and i saw a man and a woman in their late twenties leaving the faux pub. They looked kind of exhausted, unmotivated, and unimpressed. The woman said "well, at least now we've been there," as they descended the few stairs between the front door and the sidewalk. At least she said something like that, at any rate. The pronoun struck me, sounded almost foreign, and that's when i realized how little i use it now, how rare it is that i invoke the collectivity of the first person plural except in the very past tense, the perfect, the concluded, how lonely my life is right now.
There's an episode in the first season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (which i now think is like ten million times better than Six Feet Under,) in which a classmate of Buffy's, ignored by teachers and students alike, becomes physically invisible, vanishes from sight when the rest of the world declines to see her. She goes on an invisible psychotic rampage and tries to disfigure and maim Cordelia, but that isn't the point (the episode's X-filesian conclusion, in which invisible girl winds up at a top secret training school where scores of invisible high school students become CIA assassins notwithstanding)- the episode's stregnth is in the metaphor, the adolescent fear or obsolescence and obscurity and yes, invisibility. I bring thsi up not to say that the metaphor resonates with my present secluded self-loathing, but rather to wonder if the loss of the plural subject is what's been arresting my blog productivity and quality of late. My writing feels oddly groundless, free-floating in an electronic netherworld of ideas with no connection to outside material reality or collective struggle. Clearly, i need a job.
Ok, here's the deal. I'm going to post five of my favorite songs written in the second person (singular or plural, and regardless of whether the "you" is imagined, or, let's say, George Harrison's ex-wife, or, i don't know, one deity or another) and y'all should do the same. (I am ripping off Alek ripping off Helena with the use of regionally specific contractions, for which i apologize...)
I suppose i'm less looking strictly for songs without mention of the word "I" than i am of songs written in some sort of vocative case. Generally demarcating the other precipitates (rather than necessitates) a description of the self, after all.
in no particular order:
Bob Dylan: "The Times, They Are A Changin"
Peter Tosh: "Downpressor Man"
Sleater-Kinney: "One Beat"/"A Quarter To Three"
The Smiths: "There Is a Light That Never Goes Out"
The Stooges: "I Wanna Be Your Dog"
alternate: The Fugees: "Ready or Not"
It occurs to me that virtually any Stooges or Ramones song works here - even "i wanna be sedated" And i suppose "Come On Eileen" really belongs up there as well...
Highly Illegal Edit: I added S-K's "One Beat", which may be my favorite song of the decade, although the "you" in Corin Tucker's lyrics seems hypothetical, tentative - the song is really about an eruption of subjectivity - the "i need to hear a symphony" trumps the "if you think like Thomas Edison," precisely because it is this symphony (this song) which will "shake you" (a different you, perhaps, or if the holding the same referent as it's antecedent, a far more significant one) "and your fossils out." I'm leaving up "A quarter to three" because its plaintive tenor always hits me pretty hard, though "Dance Song '97" shoudl probably be up there as well...
Today's important for two reasons. One: It's my grandfather's 88th birthday, so happy birthday, Zayde.Two: Two years ago, we were here: 
From the YaleUOC.com Timeline:On Day 4, The UOC creates "Education
in the Streets." 500 undergraduates walk out into the
streets in support of Yale's workers. In blizzard conditions, strikers,
community members, and students hold classes on College St., teaching each other
about collective action and social justice, while building an alternative vision
of what our University can look like.
this victory is huge:Last year if you'd told Levin he'd be making this reform, he'd have spat in your face. the UOC's win demonstrates that the Yale Administration can be beaten, that we can the move mountain out of our way, or tunnel straight through it if it refuses to move, to borrow some Scott Marksian metaphors. This is a huge victory not only for folks on financial aid, but for student organizing and for every undergraduate at that school, -- even the pretentious fascists.Second, what's amazing is the ways in which the UOC was able to hold Levin to an accountable timetable. This even to the point where Levin actually announces the changes two years to the day after all four unions walked out on march 3, 2003 staying on strike for a week, forging powerful new connections with the community and with undergrads and creating a pivotal moment in the history of the university. How's that for symbolism?We (meaning alumnae/i) need to keep watching what happens - Excomm penalties are clearly unnaceptable, and we need to do our part to ensure that the administration doesn't shirk away from reforming student contributions, but everyone should be congratulating those UOC folks tonight.
Deerhoof: "Panda Panda Panda"
Xiu Xiu: "Little Panda McElroy"
Dungen: "Panda"
and then there's that Panda Bear dude from Animal Collective...
It's enough to make one paranoid of all these Manchurian Candidate indie rockers and their paymasters in Beijing!
A year ago, the only people seriously talking about financial aid reform at Yale were the ones sitting in UOC meetings and trying to build a platform for the committee to organize around. Today, Richard Levin announces some serious changes to the parent contribution structure. It isn't nearly enough, but the folks behind last week's sit-in know that, and i'm betting they also know that this is one victory on the road to larger ones, so conbgratulations, folks. You guys kick ass.
but this is friggin hilarious
Were fate more propitious, i'd be at the mercury lounge rocking out to the choice cuts from Sleater-Kinney's new album, and their last six too. Since i was too much of a dumbass to buy tickets early enough, instead i've been taking my Ipod on long walks and listening to some of my favorites. All Hands and Dig Me Out are down, but i want to listen to One Beat, Call The Doctor and Hot Rock too. And i'll just have to eagerly await May 24 and the release of The Woods, which, i'm sure, is going to kick ass.Smallville really is the worst show ever. I need help.
who googled me and what the fuck do you want?
i was about to post something substantive, but then i decided i would rather quote the pixies:
In this land of strangers
There are dangers
There are sorrows
I can't see this lady
It is shady
I am leaving
Tomorrow
Even there's a reason
It's silver
It's gone.
