I've always found the phonetic similarities between "alma mater" (kind mother) and "mala mater" (bad mother, evil mother, cruel mother,) intriguing. If I weren't so concerned with the gendering of capitalist exploitation and other perfidies, i'd think the latter a good sobriquet for a certain four-letter word of a university by which i am currently employed as a casualized research assistant for a professor for whom i have enormous respect.

My cousin Kyla just got back into the states after spending two months on a boat off the coast of Antarctica, She has all these kickass pictures of Penguins, baby penguins, baby fur seals sleeping, a fin whale, and a wandering albatross. Albatrosses and Penguins kick ass. I wish I were a penguin.

I worked 8 hours this week. I spent 8 hours on the train with stamford-bound yuppies, yalite yuppies in formation, a hist/law student i used to do UMOJA with, a former professor who didn't notice, recognize, or acknowledge me, and hundreds of domestic workers returning to the city from the mansions of Greenwich and Riverside and Cos Cob, whence came the roomate who peed on my floor repeatedly freshman year. I'm hoping i can do a lot of the work from the Schomburg and elsewhere in NYC and might potentially be able to avoid having to go up to New Haven three days a week - 12 huors - for a 20 hour a week job. Not that i don't love New Haven, but being around Yale so much, with obnoxious yuppie asshole undergrads prowling elm street in packs, having to hide my face from the master of my former residential college to avoid being required to justify my presence - or explain my unnanounced absence from graduation last year, (and no, i don't think she's actually ask or care, but i gotta make my blog interesting, yo) and friends looking at me like a phantasmic apparition from beyond the grave and wondering why i haven't found something else to do elsewhere, is probably a smart idea.

I just got the invitation to my 5 year high school reunion at the beginning of June. They want to charge me 30 bucks. It's at the bar that used to be Dan Squadron's bar on 109th and Amsterdam. Nice touch there, folks. I'll probably go, but I'll grumble about thirty bucks (I saw Sleater-Kinney w/ the Shins Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Les Savy Fav & The Von Bondies and more for FREE! No way this could top that,) and i refuse to get all dressed up or otherwise yuppified. Being all shaved and the short hair is a radical enough change, methinks. In the meantime, i've seen at least one person i went to high school with every day for the last week or so - Ben, Elizabeth, Rachel B, Rachel P, Bean (though he didn't see me), Eve, and Victor - which has been kind of fun, kind of overhwelming.

Back in New Haven to finally procure an ID Card (I hope) on Monday...

CD's i've been listening to: (sorry, no song exposition today - i'm exhausted)
Fela Anikulapo Kuti and Africa '70: Zombie and Expensive Shit
Arichitecture In Helsinki: Fingers Crossed and In Case We Die
The dB's: Stands for deciBels and Repercussions (early 80's Winston-Salem jangle-pop i read a great review of somewhere and decided to check out.)
The New Pornographers: Electric Version
Annie: Anniemal

I have a job and i'm going to grad school in tthe fall. That's two of my four or so major goals for this year accomplished. And I've seen every epsiode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Ever. Not too shabby. I wonder if i can get fired for blogging. Intriguing.

backing down

The Times reports that Brinkley will not impose the penalties outlined in his memo.

Eric Foner, a history professor who is a friend
of the provost, said he considered the proposals in the memo outrageous but did
not believe they represented Dr. Brinkley's personal views.
Professor Foner
said that when Dr. Brinkley was chairman of the history department, before
becoming provost, he strongly opposed any kind of punishment for striking
students.
Dr. Brinkley said that the ideas he had put into the memo had grown
out of conversations among members of his working group and others and that they
had been assembled in a memo he sent out to make further conversation
easier.

If you'd spent two months on a ridge in Northern Arizona...

you'd think this was incredibly cool, too.

Off to New Haven again tomorrow, this time regarding work/ (well, technically, the last time was about work as well, just not mine. Not yet anyway.) I'm going to be doing research for a professor. I don't know how the commute thing will work out, but i'm hoping it will.

I hereby apologize to Amelia, Ana, and anyone else i may have offended with the gratuitous acapella bashing in the previous post. I also forgot the requisite 'except shades.' The Problem of Leisure deeply regrets the error.

Speaking of New Haven...

Last Thursday, I thought I had finally met someone in power who would be willing to listen. If Betts would sit down with GESO, I am sure he would discover that we share many of the same ideals. Rather than having to strike repeatedly to have our voices heard, I believed for a moment that we would finally be able to get the respect we as teachers deserve.

I am uncertain about what transpired between Thursday night and Friday morning, but I am certain that Betts bowed to the pressure of Yale administration’s official line on the union.

five songs

A.C. Newman, "The Town Halo," (from The Slow Wonder.) The rest of the slow wonder sounds more or less like Newman's supergroup The New Pornographers. "The Town Halo" sounds more like Charles Thompson and The Boston Pops revealing a long lost track from the Surfer Rosa sessions. I think it's my favorite song on the album. Edit: Ok, maybe it's more like Charles Thompson meets Matson Jones...

The Bloc Party, "Staying Fat" (from the eponymous EP.) The vocals in the verse sound like a sleater-kinney bridge. Is this homage or just derivative?

Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra, "Big Man" (from Who Is This America?). Biting postcolonial scarcasm from Brooklyn anarchist Fela disciples expressed in the form of conversational gratitude for global (and credit card) debt, imperial exploitation, and capitalist class war. The instrumentation is tight and the singer's affected ennui/sycophancy is perfect.

"This story is a about a big, big man and the small, small man that made him. Small man says, 'O big man, in all your greatness, what can i do for you? Give me a job now. Let me work 80 hours a week to make money so i can give the same money back to you, big man, when i buy your beautiful products. This is the system...'"

The Raincoats, "No Side To Fall In."

TV on the Radio, "Mr. Grieves," (from Young Liars EP). It's a fucking acapella (plus bass and fingersnaps) cover of one of the best songs off one of the best rock albums ever. Yale made me hate acapella. And yet i still like this cover.

Sorry about all the music posts lately, but here's another one:

Michaelangelo Matos (with some multimedia assistance from Oliver Wang) on "the cultural history of 'Apache'"

In other words, a record written by a white Englishman imitating Native Americans as portrayed by white Americans and made famous by a Dane with a vaguely Hawaiian sound, arranged by a Canadian, became the biggest record in black New York. Juggling multiple copies of the track’s percussion break until they became a hypnotic rhythmic mantra, over which his accompanying MCs would rhyme, Kool Herc and the pioneering hip-hop DJs who followed him—the most storied being Afrika Bambaataa and Grandmaster Flash—turned the Incredible Bongo Band’s “Apache” into an underground hit in the manner of other early-’70s records like Manu Dibango’s “Soul Makossa” or TSOP’s “Love Is the Message”—a DJ specialty, played and treasured by those in the know. And like those songs, “Apache” eventually become a mass-cult hit. It just wouldn’t do it as itself.

Jeff Chang on Gang of Four

Meeting on the campus of the University of Leeds in punk's Year Zero, King and Gill were soon running the school's film society while studying fine arts and Situationism. They could be comfortable in all-night bull sessions about "complicity", "overdetermination", and "totalities". Their lyrics were like a critical theory seminar, which only then was beginning to become the rage on university campuses. They packed songs with aphorisms that triangulated McLuhan, Marx, and Mao.

Simon Reynolds, whose new book Rip It Up And Start Again was recently released in the UK and will arrive here in February 2006, notes that postpunk emerged from a polarized political and intellectual climate not unlike the current North American blue-red divide. Thatcher's Tories and the racist, ultrarightist National Front and British Movement were gaining ground. At the same time, cultural studies pioneers like Dick Hebdige and Paul Willis were discovering new forms of praxis, while their students joined Trotskyist, anarchist, feminist and Marxist organizations. Reynolds says, "Thinking, talking, singing songs about these kinds of things would have been considered a very consequential activity, a form of resistance. Performing at Rock Against Racism benefit gigs or Anti-Nazi League festivals and tours was de rigeur for postpunk bands.

"In some ways I see the whole postpunk era as a gigantic riposte to the Rolling Stones “It’s Only Rock’n’Roll”—the resignation and underachievement represented by the cop-out sentiment of that song, which basically kissed the Sixties good-bye. Basically insisting, no, it’s not just good times music, it can be a vessel for all this weightier stuff," he adds. "Gang of Four would have been in the vanguard of that move to see how much substance rock could carry and still be rock."

Certainly Go4's lyrics read well as text. *Solid Gold's* "Paralysed" is still stunning, interlocking haikus on late capitalism's desperately emasculating effects. One of their best songs was called "Why Theory?" Songs like "Damaged Goods", "Ether", or "Anthrax" carried on dramatic internal dialogues; figuratively and literally, they read like theater.

y otra vez

or otra vey, more like it! (It's Spiddish! For those of us too Ashkenazic to know Ladino!)

Lev?

More Two-Tone

While The Specials, Madness, and The Beat dominated the two-tone movement (sharing the airwaves with The Selecter, Bad Manners, and Northern Soul revivalists Dexy's Midnight Runners,) one two tone band that doesn't get nearly enough attention (in part because of limited output, particularly when compared to Madness or The Beat,) is The Body Snatchers. Like The Specials and The Beat, (and unlike Madness,) The Body Snatchers were multiracial, ("two-tone,") and openly antiracist. Unlike any of these bands, and perhaps any band in the history of ska and reggae to that point (the late 1970s,) The Body Snatchers were all women. While there were several very important female singers prominent in Jamaican popular music since its roots in the Mento and Buru of the '50s - Phyllis Dillon, Millie Smalls, Marcia Griffiths, Doreen Shaffer, etc, -- all were backed by male session musicians like the omnipresent Skatalites. So the body snatchers were really quite unique even as revivalists. Their lyrics, on songs like the wonderful "Easy Life," were explicitly feminist and anti-authoritarian, and their vocal arrangements and singing styles were clearly very influential on later bands, like the American transplant The Toasters, whose old label i worked for when I was in high school. But this stuff stands on its own, and I urge readers to get ahold of "Easy Life," "Ruder Than You," and whatever else you can get your hands on. I doubt you'll be disappointed.

Other songs i'm listening to obsessively tonight:
The Gin Blossoms - "Until I Fall Away" I've always loved "Hey Jealousy" and "Found Out About You," but i kind of forgot about "Until I Fall Away" after i hit puberty i guess. It's pretty good.

The Stone Roses "I want to be adored" - what the fuck happened to this band? This song is incredible!

The (English) Beat - "Rotating Head" - unfortunately, being the soundtrack to every single zany comedy trailer for at least the first 15 years after its release has made this song harder to appreciate than the rest of the band's opus. The great bouncy syncopated guitar lines are typical of the band at its best.

speaking of two-tone

Nouvelle Vague's cover of "Friday Night, Saturday Morning," a Specials original i never really quite understood in high school, but now, upon hearing it in my present context, find somewhat powerful - far more so that the first album's "Nite Klub," certainly - is pretty terriffic. I don't really like their take on "Love Will Tear Us Apart" or their watering-down of "Guns Of Brixton," but the detatched, spacy vocals work almost as well as Terry Hall's dispassionate , sneering, self-loathing and stark imagery.

"Freebird!"

This is very funny.

A few years ago, Mr. Doughty started promoting the Weather Girls' "It's Raining Men" as the new "Freebird," asking audiences at his solo shows to call for the disco chestnut instead. Now, he says, he gets yells for both songs at every performance.

Five songs i'm crazy about today (i wish i were doing an mp3 blog sometimes.)

1.The New Pornographers - "July Jones." Probably my favorite song from Electric Version, it sounds like a cross between Madness and, um, The New Pornographers.

2.The (English) Beat: "Too Nice To Talk To" -- The Beat were, along with Madness and The Specials, the central figures in the late '70s-early '80s british two-tone ska revival. "Too Nice To Talk To," the lead track from the band's second LP, Wh'appen, a funkified percussive pop romp, is among their best, though largely ignored because it isn't on I Just Can't Stop It, the band's classic first LP, which everyone should own. They got back together on VH1 last summer. I only saw the end. I'm sure the whole thing was sufficiently surreal.

3.John Lennon, - "Oh Yoko"

Paul Westerberg's playing at the Supper Club tonight, (I'm not going) so number 4. has to be "Favorite Thing" off of Let It Be.

5.The Cure - "Grinding Halt." Ok, i'm not really that crazy about this song. But it is a pretty cool song. And the cure haven't sounded anything like this in a long, long time.

the end of an era

I have deleted the old quotations page from geocities.com/zachsw - my very old webpage i set up at some point in high school. I decided to do this for several reasons - primarily because it gets google hits when people search for me and there are some quotes that really shouldn't be in the public domain from people with real jobs who do important work. This is something i probably shold have done a while ago. So while i'm saving everything, of course, this is the last you'll see of it online. If, for some incomprehensible reason you want a copy, let me know, and i'll email it to you. In the meantime, here are some of the greatest hits of www.geocities.com/zachsw/quotations.html

"I am the Twenties. Hear me roar." - M. Jacob K, high school.
"I haven't been innundated by waves of Yiddish postmodernism but i'm expecting them any day." - My Yiddish Professor, 2002 (before i dropped the class.)
"Often, we find the bulldog taking it up the ass from the pumpkin." - Saqib
"I control the entire police department!" - Ben (he was joking.)
"You're a generally hairy people." - My sophomore year roomate, Nana, on the Jews, 2002
"My notes are all floppy" - my History of Modern South Asia professor, 2002
"Whaddaya say, klizzinator, klizznine, klizerator" - Abbey (to Katie) 2002.
"He's like a fish with money!" - Julie on Holcombe Green
"Someday, Irma, I'll teach you how to dance." - Josh
"Soy un superhero loco y borracho." - Josh
"If a woman identifies herself as Vinny, you have the right number." - Vinny 2/28/2003
"And then we shot airplanes at their dogs." - Bob P. on corp. visits.
"Cathy will kill me but Will, he will thrill me, we'll use a power drill." - Abbey, 4/20/2003, to the tune of "It's better with a union man."
"I'm not crotch-stuffing Godzilla." - Grace
"There's too much organizing going on in this cafe. I'm going to go get a muffin." - K

And while Brinkley prepares the putsch, Nat Hentoff, sanctimonious defender of 'liberty,' is still taking his cues over "academic freedom" from the David Project. What a joke.

apparently taking a lesson from the Dick Brodheads of the world, Alan Brinkley issues a memo outlining and implementing the nuclear option against Columbia University's graduate teachers, in a bald attempt at using fear and intimidation - which ought to have no place in a university, but neoliberalism doesn't really give a shit about "oughts" -- to break the union.

The whole world is watching.

(and so are the undergrads -- the columbia spectator not only says that GSEU should be proud of its accomplishments last week, -- they want them to organize the adjuncts too.)

The graduate student strike is over, and
Graduate Student Employees United should be proud of the statement it made. All
last week, while TAs and research assistants were chanting on the picket lines,
sympathetic faculty members moved their classes off campus in solidarity. Those
faculty members threw their support in the right direction, but some of them
should have been out striking too.
Although graduate students are overworked
and underpaid, the University’s adjuncts—its part-time professors who lack
tenure-track positions—have it even worse. TAs at Columbia complain that they
often can’t make ends meet with their $17,000 stipend, yet adjuncts often have
to live with even less than that. More than half of adjuncts nationwide make
less than $16,000 annually.
At Columbia and all over the country,
administrations exploit their adjuncts. The American Association of University
Professors reports that on average, adjuncts make a jaw-dropping 64 percent less
per hour than tenure-track assistant professors. Adjuncts often do not receive
basic benefits such as medical coverage and retirement plans. Yes, adjuncts are
part-time employees, but most do not have time to pursue other livelihoods: the
National Center for Education Statistics reports that adjuncts work an average
of 36.9 hours per week. Strapped for cash, universities use more cheap adjunct
labor every year. As of four years ago, 28 percent of classes nationwide were
taught by adjuncts, up from six percent in 1980.
Despite being mistreated,
adjuncts play a vital role here. Some of Columbia’s best-known professors are
adjuncts. Deborah Mowshowitz, director of Undergraduate Programs for the
Department of Biological Sciences, is an adjunct, as is Richard Sacks in the
Department of English and Comparative Literature. Were adjuncts to strike along
with graduate students, academics at Columbia would shut down.
Frustrated
adjuncts at other universities have begun to unionize. About 20 percent of
adjuncts nationwide currently belong to a union. At New York University, where
about 70 percent of the faculty work part-time, adjuncts unionized in 2002 as
Adjuncts Come Together, a local affiliate of United Auto Workers. ACT boasts on
its Web site that NYU adjuncts now receive subsidized health care, continuous
employment protections, and “some of the highest rates of pay for part-time
academic work in New York City.” Not coincidentally, NYU also has a graduate
student union.
As Columbia’s other group of persecuted scholars, adjuncts
make natural allies for GSEU. High turnover within the adjunct population might
make it hard for these professors to organize a union, but if unionization gave
adjuncts reasonable benefits and a living wage, the effort would be more than
worth it. This time next year, if adjuncts were striking with graduate students,
both groups would be able to do much more than make a statement. They might even
make a union.

a polemic against no one in particular

alright. I'm pissed off about something inconsequential again.

This time, it's several blogs i've read recently which have all tried to claim that "Train In Vain" is either the best song the clash ever recorded or the best song on London Calling (same difference.) These people are drowning in BS. Sorry about the graphic imagery.

First, let me state that "Train In Vain" is a wonderful song. If you like blatant motown ripoff. No, i'm mostly kidding. It's a great song. I've loved it ever since i figured out it was on the cd. (I think it's been listed on the liners of the last two CD releases, which is sort of a travesty. At any rate, my first copy of London Calling -- I've gone through a couple, like the original record, preserved the clandestinity of this hidden track. In a lot of ways, it's typical of Strummer and Jones's genre-hopping, experimental punk ethic and pop genius. Some of the lyrics are brilliant - "i see all my dreams come tumbling down... so alone i'll keep the wolves at bay..." -- it's powerful stuff.

But the real climactic end to London Calling isn't "Train," it's "Revolution Rock," when Strummer and Jones proclaim that "this here music mash up the nation/this here music cause a sensation," a metalyric reference to the purpose and intent of the album's syncretic genrebending rebel music, and i feel like if "Train," almost an afterthought, hadn't acquired so much mileage from it's "hidden track" mystique, it might have been forgotten a long time ago. The truth is, almost every song on the album is incredible, from the opening power chords of the title track to the anticapitalist disco lament of "Lost In The Supermarket," the ridiculously mangled espanol in "Spanish Bombs," Strummer's homage to Catalonia, the joyous reggae explosion of "Rudie Can't Fail" and the defiant pounding of Paul Simonon's bassline of "Guns of Brixton."

I don't have a favorite song on London Calling. Like the Pixies' Doolittle, all perfect. Indeed, the act of singling any one song on the album from the others has always struck me as an enterprise doomed from the start. I mean, every gimmick hungry yob digging gold from rock and roll has grabbed the mic to tell us, he'll die before he's sold...

No wait, that has nothing to do with this argument, does it? Bh. Although -- watch out, Benny 16...

I suppose i'll conclude then by insisting that those who want to exalt "Train In Vain" alone need to tale a much closer look at the rest of the freaking album.

Thank you. The end.

songs i'm crazy about this week:

1.M83 - "Don't Save Us From The Flames." Heard it for the first time last night. Way behind the hipster set on this one. The wall of sound is overwhelming and almost operatic. I have no idea what the lyrics are about, because i can't understand them.

2.Sleater-Kinney - "The Fox" (and "Entertain.")

3.Blondie - "Hangin' On The Telephone." Reminiscent of early Specials reggae-punk, and they came out at exactly the same time (1978.) The chicken scratch of the guitars on the bridge ("oh, why can't we talk again") sound like a phone ringing. Or maybe a rotary phone being dialed. It doesn't matter. Chris Stein was the most underrated guitarist in punk rock, Deborah Harry is Deborah Harry, and the song's amazing.

4.Annie - "Heartbeat."

5.Rick Springfield - "Jessie's Girl." What? You got a problem with that? You wanna take this outside? I like cheesy music. I mean shit, just cause the lead singer isn't a pair of pit bulls or a macaw...

Ok. He thinks we should consider the possibility that women naturally suck at science and math to excuse the fact that people like him make it extraordinarily difficult for women scientists to remain in academia. This nearly gets him fired. And now we learn that this comes just a few months after big L proclaimed that Native Americans were "dependent" and may or may not have referred to the demographic collapse written of by the Berkeley school as "coincidental", which is in some ways a half-truth, since it's believed that Europeans in North America on at least one occasion knowingly employed germ warfare to speed the process along. At any rate, if Summers was dismissive and even racist, given his trqack record, would anyone other than Stephen Pinker be surprised?

Yet More Sleater-Kinney

they're blogging.

And they have good taste in templates.

More S-K

Finally heard "The Fox" off tonight's pitchfork podcast. Kind of like Sonic Youth meets, i don't know, somebody really noisy. Wolf Eyes maybe. I can't wait until May 24.

Josh has posted a series of great passover-related quotes tonight. They are like a miniature Haggadah, and they're all really good, even the Michael Walzer one.

Let's Get Free

Passover/Pesach was always one of my favorite Jewish Holy Days. It's all about slavery and liberation, struggle, work, and exodus. It's also about hubris and genocide, zionism and violence, and i've always found in the various Hagadd-whatever the plural is (Josh?) a great deal to wrestle with (to steal a phrase from Erin Scharff.) Over the last four years, Passover became even more important - a time to spend with new friends and surrogate family and think very critcally about organizing, social justice, Judaiism, and matzoh. (I LOVVVVE matzoh. I could eat it all year. But i don't.) Sometimes, the seder even became an act of protest, as with the one Josh and Katie led at the Better Way Village, with like forty or 50 people sitting in a huge circle on Beinecke.

So it's odd and a bit disappointing not doing a first seder because no one in my family really cares enough to organize one. And tonight, returning to the bizarre (and bazaar) family seder zoos at my great aunt and uncle's on 94th street, with thirty or so people each year shouting out feminine pronouns whenever masculine pronouns are employed by whoever the author of whatever the Haggadah by great uncle's used for the last four decades is, will be hard as well. At some point, all the adults who've been doing this seder for more than ten or fifteen years will start singing the University of Illinois fight song. (This has historically been when i leave the room in mock embarassment. It's actually kind of endearing. You sort of have to be there, I guess.) But after making passover something else, something which held a great deal more meaning for me, this feels a little like failure. And there will be lots of fucked-up family drama I really don't want to have to deal with and shouldn't get into here. Alright. Enough whining. I hope all di yidn who read this, and the goyim too, have good passovers.

In happier news, i may have found some work doing some research for one of my professors, which i'm happy about.

Sleater-Kinney's seventh album, The Woods, comes out on May 24. There are all sorts of rumors flying around - "jam band," "pearl jam," etc., but i just watched the video for "Entertain" on the band's webpage, and you should too, because it is awesome. Not "One Beat" awesome, but i'm sure it will grow on everybody, and nothing is "One Beat" awesome

I want to write a rock opera about "Debra." (You remember, back when Beck was good.)
"I pick you up late at night after work/ I said lady, step inside my Hyundai. I'm gonna take you up to Glendale..." Holy shit.

People usually do this Friday, but i am delinquent.
(itunes shuffle masturbation take 1)

1.Miles Davis "Frelon Brun"
2.The Replacements "Answering Machine"
3.The Coup "5 Million Ways to Kill a CEO"
4.The Strokes "Meet Me In The Bathroom." (I'm so embarrased.)
5.Swell Maps "Let's Build A Car"
6. Danger Mouse feat Jay-Z and The Beatles "My 1st Song"
7.James Brown "Call Me Super Bad"
8.The Clash "Career Opportunities"
9.Cee-Lo feat. Ludacris "Childz Play"
10.Drive-By Truckers "Carl Perkins' Cadillac"

Now this is just ridiculous. God forbid the "People's Republic of Berkeley" should actually support people who support people. You know what I mean. They'd never get away with crap like this in New Haven.

No, Its Not Wrong, But I Must Know.../I Didn't Mean To Hurt You - I'm Just a Jealous Guy

I want to make some clarifications about the "Education In The Streets" post. First, i'm in no way trying to claim that undergraduates or the UOC 'own' the action, which was only possible and succesful the first time around because thousands of maintenance, service, clerical, technical, and academic workers were striking. Not that a lot of undergraduates didn't put a huge amount of organizing work into that week - but whereas with the financial aid campaign the UOC was able to craft its own timeline and make demands on the administration according to that timeline, in '03 we were almost entirely dependent on the federation timeline and the organizing of Locals 34, 35, and GESO, District 1199, and CCNE. One of the things that was powerful about the action and one of the things that made it work was the fact that everyone owned it.

As for the question of turnout, well, i was in a daze for most of the March Strike action, I just know we had 500 undergrads cause that was the official count and given how many people were there, and how many advance confirmations we had prior to the action, and how many stickers we gave out, and how many undergrads weren't wearing stickers, it seems more than plausible. This strike was the first time GESO'd gone out without the rest of the federation since the end of the grade strike in 1996. That they were in a position to do so last week demonstrates their strength as much as does the fact that folks i'd heard openly badmouth the union only a year ago were not only on the picket lines last week, but, in some cases, were leading them.

Really what i wanted to look at in the post was the implications of the possibility of the Classrooms In the Street model becoming a unique and representative tactic of Yale labor struggles. I guess in the end, i don't have too much to say about this, so maybe i should open up the conversation to any thoughts my three to five readers might have on the subject...

More clarifications will likely follow as i continue to second-guess myself.

Ok, so i'm all Yale-blogged out for the moment - with something like three thousand words over the last two weeks or so. Give me some time to figure out what else I want to write about nowadays. In the meantime, you can post comments on the stuff i've written telling me what a pompous dumbass i am. Make fun of Alek Felstiner's posture. Listen to Dinosaur Jr.'s reissued You're Living All Over Me or MIA's Arular or anything by The New Pornographers or A.C. (Carl) Newman. Send angry emails to Roland Betts pointing out to him that he is lying. Or, you could help me find a cheap apartment in Brooklyn...

So, somebody tell me -- When did the Yale Herald turn into Light & Truth Lite?

Roland's Empty Bet

YaleCorp senior fellow Roland "I love W almost as much as I love my millions and millions of Dollars" Betts tries to squirm out of having agreed to meet with GESO last Thursday.

"There was no misunderstanding," said Wendi Walsh, a lead
organizer for the group. "I had a very clear, very explicit conversation with
him." She said Betts' recollection of the conversation is the result of a
disagreement within the Yale administration on how to approach the issue. "I
think that the graduate teachers just want to make the university better," she
said. "We would welcome the opportunity to sit down" with university
officials.

"Educación En Las Calles, El Segundo Parte"

So Josh Eidelson dubbed GESO's ressurection Tuesday of the UOC's "Education In The Streets" action of March 6, 2003. The original action, concieved of by Abbey Hudson in a UOC "action committee" meeting just over a week before its actual execution, and later elaborated on and fleshed out by Abbey and several more of us at a meeting in Book Trader a day or two later, was in some ways the central and defining moment of not only the UOC's then brief but spirited seven month history, but of the three years or so of undergraduate student labor organizing since the end of the Students Against Sweatshops occupation of Beinecke plaza in April of 2000. I say this in part because of the logistics - EITS was the largest undergraduate-on-campus action since the SAS campaign, with some five hundred undergraduates and hundreds of strikers and community members -- in the middle of a blizzard, with three inches of snow shrouding Cornel West's 'fro. I was excited about it not only because of the numbers, but because of its multilayered symbolic power. Strikers were teaching students about their university, not so much a simple reversal as a new and counterhegemonic vision of the kind of university and city the movement could create - one in which workers are not "invisible" but central and constitutive of and to the production of knowledge, one in which those who produce the knowledge hoarded by post-Bayh-Dole Yale radically untether their work from the kinds of post-fordist capital accumulation embraced by university administrators and instead, together with service and clerical workers and hospital workers, redefine what universities do and who runs them. What was powerful about Education In the Streets, besides the blizzard, was that this new vision of the university wasn't only being expounded upon through speech, or even only performed, but, in fact, every student, teacher, worker, clergy member, organizer, community activist, and Ben Healey present was actively creating that new university where we stood. And we were building committee too.

The Better Way Village was supposed to be an inheritor of Education in The Streets, but didn't really function as such. It's creation wasn't a particularly organic process -- arising more by the default created by the decision to suspend the strike until August than anything else, and we didn't get the kind of undergraduate turnout we needed. Where Education in the streets was participatory and operated upon a constituent model, with its stregnth in the conversations held and the acts of teaching, learning, and communication, the BWV sometimes felt more like an empty showroom -- conversations happened, some of them powerful, but the action lacked the immediacy and vision of Education In The Streets or "Reclaim Our Campus" before it, with its messages to Levin strung from the trees outside Woodbridge Hall, video messages, cell phone blitzes, and Thomas Frampton in a huge purple wig.

GESO's revival of the classrooms in the street action both reproduced much of what was useful and powerful the first time around, while doing some things better. While the crowd was smaller, with only one union on strike (and, combined with the lack of a "hard picket" over which to guilt folks about crossing, thus a diminshed ability to turn out undergrads too, i'd imagine,) and the balmy weather detracted somewhat from one of the more mythic aspects of the original action, this time around, save for Jamie Kirchick and his band of spoiled, malicious idiots, who had two days earlier attacked an SJN ice cream social for prospective students by proclaiming that GESO kills babies and eats them, caused the tsunami, and killed all the Jews (i shit you not,) there seemed to be much more of a dialogue, a much more multivocal conversation happening this time around than last time, as the "audience" became students and teachers, asking incisive questions, contributing their own experiences of work and struggle at Yale, and transforming the action into less of a performance and more of what it was originally intended to be, which is fantastic and was amazing to be a part of. I spent the entire action at Dan Gilbert, Phillip Ziesche, and Michael Denning's class on "Teaching in The Corporate University," which I guess i'll be doing soon enough, and was amazed at the things people were bringing to the conversation and the kinds of solutions folks were proposing to the casualization of teaching and the corporatization of academic work.

If the "Classrooms In The Street" model becomes a recurring tactic/tradition of Yale labor struggles, that would be both really cool, and in many ways profoundly appropriate. Among many other things, the movement in New Haven has been a learning experience for all involved. Speaking for myself, it's taught me not only how to organize, but also how to look at universities and workers and migration and the intersections and contradictions of globalized knowledge production. And it's teaching Yale and New Haven every day that, well, this is what democracy looks like.


(photo swiped from mcplunk w/o permission. Any picture which has an arrow pointing to Wendi Walsh talking to Roland Betts kicks some serious ass.)

The Senate Democrats (all but Ron Wyden and Tom Harken -- yes, Josh, even Feingold,) who voted today to confirm John Negroponte as director of national intelligence or whatever must really love death squads. Because they knew what he did in Honduras, this is the only rational explanation i can reach for such a shocking capitulation to a man (possibly more than) complicit in tens of thousands of murders. Whether this is calculated cowardice or just simple fascism doesn't matter. Any pretense of the democrats as "the good guys" or the "reality based community" is now dead.

by popular request

Erin "come to New York" Scharff has an interesting post on feminist seders and Gender inequity at the RAC Blog. Read it.

Four years ago today, I was in Quebec City, breathing in the billowing clouds of tear geas, dodging canisters with Matthew and Justin, and, as thousands of people danced in the barricaded streets, trying to envision and solidify the connections between the fight against the FTAA and the fight in New Haven. Four years, as many more Michael Denning seminars, several bad papers, an Unfarallon Campaign, a senior essay, and a great deal of organizing later, i feel a great deal more confident about these links and solidarities, and thus i took three days out of my busy schedule to return to New Haven for the first time in seven months, but really, substantially, for the first time in the eleven months since i'd moved out of my apartment on Bishop Street, where I'd lived for the last two years of college and the entirety of the summer in between, in order to support, mostly as a body and occasional leafletter and carrier of massive felt-and-wire pencils, the striking graduate teachers of GESO, whose one week walkout together with Columbia's GSEU, is the sixth strike in the union's fifteen year history.

The first three days of the strike were powerful. The signs on the back of Rachel B.-D.'s dog, the post structuralist placards of art historians, the winding serpent of hundreds of people picketing in front of Sterling Memorial Library, demanding justice and fighting for the future of the academy, the thunderous words of Scott Marks outside Battel Chappel, in which Roland Betts had locked himself to avoid having to speak to the people who make the university with whose management he's entrusted work, TAs pushing baby carriages on picket lines and speaking about how Yale refuses to pay for life-saving HIV drugs and forces the state to foot the bill despite a budget several billion dollars greater than the Israeli Defense Forces have all made very clear the stakes of GESO's fight and the creativity and vision of the folks who are fighting it across the federation and the New Haven community. Yesterday, as we took to the streets of the bourgie-mall-ified upper west side, past the smoldering pit where Columbia Bagels used to be, the focus shifted to the right to organize academic workers on a national sclae, the fight against gentrifying landgrabs by tax exempt institutions bent on exploiting the Bayh-Dole act to reap massive windfalls at the expense of the same contingent workers whom they continue to argue are mere apprentices, and solidarity across the boundaries of state, union, and nation.

As i'm writing, Jesse Jackson is preparing to address TAs at NYU, where the first unionized TAs at a private US university have a contract expiration date in August - right about the time i show up on campus. Unless the threat of a strike is again enough to bring the NYU administration around before i get the chance, I'll be a part of that fight because a victory in New York will greatly increase not only my ability to survive a Ph.D. program in the third most expensive city in the country, but it'll also contribute, in a small way, to the fight at Columbia, and to the one at Yale, without which there might be no NYU fight and which, when GESO does win, may initiate a largescale erosion to administrative resistance to private university graduate teacher unionism, as one of the most vehement and powerful opponents steps out of the battlefield. I continue to feel odd about leaving New Haven (again) and a fight which has played such a formative role in my organizing and academic work, but i also know that i'm not abandoning the movement and that the most powerful way to help folks in New Haven win is to build stregnth where i am.

That said, i'm really glad that I made it up this week. Being around for the strike's first three days was, among other things a powerful kick in the ass to go out and rejoin the movement which has not only asked what other kinds of "global universities" might be possible, but has begun to create them in the streets of New Haven, New York, Porto Alegre, and across the planet.

and another one bites the dust

Ecuadoreans oust another neoliberal ruler.

President Lucio Gutiérrez of Ecuador abandoned his office
today in the face of potent protests, and the Ecuadorean Congress swore in Vice
President Alfredo Palacio to replace him. Mr. Gutiérrez became the third
president since 1997 to be ousted in the small but oil-rich Andean country,
which has close economic ties to the United States.

I'm up in New Haven for the next few days supporting my brothers and sisters in GESO. I'll blog about it when i get back to the city. Until then, call the Rick Levin at 203 432 2550 and tell him he can end this strike now by recognizing the work graduate teachers do to make Yale educations possible.

"My life is getting kinda hectic/let's resolve the dialectic!" - GESO History/Amstud chant, HGS.

holy crap!

"Another University Is Possible"

Yesterday, two people told me about a conference which was to take place this weekend and of which I'd been heretofore utterly unaware. It turns out that this conference, the Global Left Dialogue's 2005 Left Forum was really a reworking and reimagining of the Socialist Scholar's Conference, which I went to once when I was seventeen, mostly to see Noam Chomsky speak at the opening plenary, and which I'd found sort of uselessly sectarian and seemingly mired in very old debates which I found relatively useless as someone trying then to envision what anarchist organizing could look like in the context of a New York city high school (this was before Seattle, and before the Fieldston Revolutionary Anarchist Collective of Activist Students, which I won't take the time to explain here, but felt the need to namedrop for nostalgia's sake.)

The conference's new incarnation seems to have shed much of the old sectarian baggage, the Spartacists and their fetishized commodity politics banished to the sidewalks outside the CUNY Graduate Center and the DSA affiliation kept quiet if still present at all in an attempt, one speaker told me, to reconfigure the event in accordance with the plethora of "Social Forums," organized throughout the globe. My curiosity piqued, I decided to attend some of Saturday's events. I went first to a panel titled "Postmodernism and Democracy, featuring Jan Riehman of Union Theological Seminary, David Ruccio of the journal Rethinking Marxism, Duke University Lit Theorist and Toni Negri collaborator Michael Hardt, and my undergraduate advisor, Michael Denning. Some observations: most claimed to dislike both of the words by which the panel's topic was defined. Michael (Denning) grappled with this problem by reworking and to some extent reconfiguring some key points he made in his Devane Lecture from 2001 regarding "The Democracy" and the historical relationship between the state and the social. He also put Hardt on the spot, playfully wondering aloud at the meaning behind Multitude's concluding invocation of "The New Science of Democracy: Madison and Lenin." (I for one, wish I'd asked whether or not the link made between St. Augustine and the wobblies in the "Intermezzo" of Empire was solely an account of the historical trajectory of small-r republicanism, or, indeed, as I have sometimes suspected, a slightly bizarre Dylan reference.

Riehman seemed the most frustrated with Postmodernism, and also the most willing to engage in twenty-year old arguments the others wanted to declare no longer worth rehashing. While not discounting the need for some changes in the tools of critical analysis, Riehman was skeptical of the "post" as beyond approach explicitly embraced in Empire. He openly expressed frustration with, even contempt for those whose work employed formulations of "immaterial labor," which led Hardt to interject, "you mean me?" I don't wish to downplay the problems in Hardt and Negri's praxis, because I believe their are many, but I am not sure that H&N's account of informatized labor and production (I believe they use this word more than immaterial, though Munoz has borrowed my copy of Empire and I am thus unable to verify this assertion,) is as atomized or reified as Riehman wanted to claim today. Hardt's response to this question and to an audience member's question regarding the relevance and or constitution of the working class and the need for new methodologies was to launch into the "Symptoms of Passage" riff, again from Empire, which alleges that Postmodernism's embrace of fragmentation and hybridity occurred decades after global capitalism had already recognized the value of such tools, make what its proponents envisioned as a liberatory praxis of joy and freedom (the rebellion against grand narratives and unitary truths) was indeed more a "symptom" of the cultural logics of the new forms of empire than a means of countering it. Hardt's argument was more or less as compelling and as effusive in person as in print, though Hardt himself strikes a far more sympathetic and far less incendiary pose in the flesh than on the page.

The second panel I checked out concerned the neoliberal university, was presented by Michael Denning's working group on Globalization and Culture, and dealt, with the exception of Naomi Paik's paper on the implications of the neoconservative project of HR 3077, primarily with questions raised by Yale University's history and present of struggle. On the eve of next week's strike, Dan Gilbert spoke powerfully of GESO members as a new sort of activist public intellectual. He also powerfully summarized the legacy and future of industrial unionism on Yale's campus, something which has contributed a great deal to the strength and vision of the movement in New Haven. REDACTED used the pernicious planetary pillaging of Farallon Capital Management to look at means of fighting the global university's neoliberal agenda on a global scale, while Sumanth Gopinath looked at CCNE and CORD in the context of Social Movement Unionism and Michael Denning's own formulation of the "University-Hospital City." Denning, for his part, spoke of universities as engines of globalization and insisted that "another university is possible," locating the Yale struggle in the context of global social movements in a way I've been trying to do for years and failing in comparison.

I seem on the threshold of entering into a new struggle at a very different university with its own set of crises and antinomies, assuming I enroll in NYU's American Studies program, which I probably ought to do. This feels strange; the Yale fight and the social movement built in New Haven over the past sixty-five/thirty-seven/twenty-six/fifteen/7 or so years has played -- and even now continues to play a major role in forming my intellectual and political (in the broadest Gramscian sense) concerns and projects. Listening to the Initiative panel reminded me of the centrality of the experiences of student organizing and solidarity to how I understand myself as a constituted subject, something half-forgotten amidst four months of near-seclusion, inactivity, and depression. It also pushed me to add, in whatever way I can, new contributions to this dialogue, and perhaps this is as good a way as any to think, in very broad terms, about what I want to be doing in graduate school. In the meantime, I'll be going up to New Haven Monday morning, or maybe Sunday evening(?) and joining picket lines for in the third strike at Yale University in barely two years as this fight to constitute a new global/urban commons continues.




Edited 2:00 PM to fix a link, elaborate on the "symptoms of passage" argument, and fix some awkward wording.

sung tongs, indie thongs?

Last night, Norwegian electro-pop sensation Annie, backed by her band the Anniemals, played a free half hour set in a weird trendy as fuck tribeca hotel on 6th ave (namely the Tribeca Grand Hotel, fyi). I enjoyed Anniemal, Annie's debut record which, i think, the point of last night's set was probably to find a US label or distributor for or something, tremendously, as did my friend Jia Lynn, so we decided to go to the show. We got to the hotel at 9 and there was a big line forming outside. The show wound up not starting until after midnight. This was ok, since no one was paying for tickets or anything, and the brief set was worth it. (Don't believe me? Try to find "my heartbeat" online. You will.) Annie repeatedly referenced the fact that she and her band rarely did live gigs, but they sounded tight, powerful, and energetic, which is really all you can ask for from "glitch pop." During the three hour wait for the booming DJ set to end and the band to come on stage, this really tall dude was wandering around the crowd with a camera, pushing people around to get better shots of all the most photogenic hipsters. Dude put his hand on my head to steady his shot. I kid you not.

Anyway, he gets the woman standing next to me and JL to turn around, bend over, pull the bottom of her toga-like dress down and let him take a picture of her thong underwear. Then he gets the guy standing in front of her to put his face like right up against her thong and takes a picture of that. Everyone else was somewhere on a bell curve between uncomfortable, jadedly indifferent, and contemptuous, while the society photographer for the williamsburg set just stood around and looked self-satisfied and repeatedly shoved his camera in Annie's face when the set began. All of which makes me proud of my supreme dorkitry.

Got a search hit for "Lindsay Lohan Oompa Loompa." It seems that i was not the first person to make the Lohan-Loompa connection. Oh well. And i was so proud...

Yesterday was a good day. Yale announced that it would nearly double it's voluntary payments to new Haven. 82% of GESO members in the humanities and social sciences voted to strike. (Someone should probably tell the YDN that GESO didn't acually strike in September '03. Barring that, they could actually do research or something. That would be nice, i'm sure.) Those UOC kids put out a third volume of Community In Crisis. The Mets beat the astros, 1-0 in the 11th. I got accepted into NYU's American Studies PhD program off the wait list. I'm planning to accept, barring the aid packaging including so massive a debt burden as to make the whole indentured servitude thing lose even the sheen of metaphor, and i'm really excited and also really nervous.

The upshot is, this blog can probably now stop being a narcissistic outlet for my self-pitying pathos and start being useful again, which i'm sure brings a sigh of relief to all of y'all. (Now, was that my impression of Helena or my impression of Alek expropriating Helena's 'y'all?' You be the judge.)

The Fiery Furnaces are better live than recorded. Yesterday evening's show at Webster Hall, the second time i've seen them, was also easily the best. The drummer in particular was incredible, and from the opening notes of "My Dog Was Lost But Now He's Found" helped bring to the live performance an energy sometimes elusive in the album versions of many of the songs off Blueberry Boat. For the most part, the band stuck to that, their recent, bizarre, fantastic concept album, with one or two exceptions - like one of the new songs off the upcoming album the Friedbergers recently recorded with their grandmother, who was, unfortunately, not present. Eleanor Friedberger is an incredible singer, and has a unique stage presence and powerful voice, even when singing in Inuit, or lyrics like "they had a dirty beanie baby so for good luck i bought her." "Quay Cur," even though Friedberger couldn't hit the "And now I'll never never never feel like i am safe again" refrain, was fantastic, as was "Blueberry Boat." The band's live show mixes and mashes the record's songs into new hybrid, interweaving forms, making audiences question the assumptions underlying the ways in which we hear and order the music.

Webster Hall's a weird venue. Just ask the bizarre naked minotaur reliefs on all the dance floor walls.

Hey! Is this Ben Greenberg who covered Wolf Eyes(!) the same guitar god who went to my high school? Cause if so that's fucking awesome.

"I think you might be adopted. You know why? Because you were able to change the light bulb and install the DVD player."

-My Mother, 4/9/05, 9:56 AM

An out of court settlement/Ad space for burgers?

Where were you the day that hip hop fried?
Is it too early to mourn? (Nope, they stopped serving Egg McMuffins at 11:30.)
Is it too late to ride, or is the drive thru open 24 hours?

Seriously though, where's Boots Riley when you need him?


Edit: The original title of this post might have been "Glittering Prizes and Endless Compromises Shatter The Illusion of 'I'm Loving It'," before i came to my senses and realized that Mos Def was a lot more appropriate than a bunch of Canadian objectivists. I'm not going up to New Haven for the YASJ thing today because i have to help Muñoz move and because i have somewhere i need to be tonight, but i want full reportbacks.

Three Strikes and Levin's Out.

As I am writing this, blogger seems to be malfunctioning. Hopefully I’ll be able to post it while it’s still salient.

Should GESO join Columbia's GSEU and strike April 18, which, judging by the myopic YDN coverage at least and stray comments on other people's blogs (a bit out of the loop here,) seems to be what will occur, barring a sudden epiphanic outpouring of actually giving a damn about the future of teaching and research as something other than profit machines and prestige banks on the part of university administrators, the event will be an important milestone - the first joint recognition strike by graduate teachers and researchers at private universities (that i'm aware of, at any rate.) It will also be the third strike at Yale in just over two years, a fairly stunning figure, and, by my count, including the '95 grade strike, either the sixth or the seventh strike (depending on whether you count the separate walkouts by Locals 34 and 35 in '96 as one or two strikes) to take place during Richard Levin's twelve year term as University President.

Levin's administration has functioned along a set of clear principles aimed at fomenting a neoliberal reworking of the spaces and structures by which the university produces and markets knowledge and manages those whose labor makes such processes possible. To be clear, the ONHSA era of developmentalist paternalism couched in shrewd messaging, dollar diplomacy, and a great deal of right wing identity politics, while bearing some strong resemblances to earlier eras of Yale’s “urban imperialism,” (a phrase used by critics of the university’s landgrabs in the late 1960s and early 1970s,) in its host city, it is a mistake not to view both of these eras in the context of Yale’s transformation from a nationally, even globally renowned research university reacting against student and popular (problematic, I know) insurgencies against its patrician exclusivity and cold war praxis into a globalized, corporatized, “informatized” brand with an endowment larger than the GDPs of many of the disintegrating nation-states of the global south, upon whom the university has become uniquely and characteristically dependent.

Yale’s changes have occurred in the context of, made possible, and been made possible by the seismic shifts in New Haven’s populations and economies. In particular, beginning in the 1930s with the first stirrings of skilled maintenance and custodial workers in the university’s heat, light, and power department, the university’s workers, in successive and expanding waves of newly proletarianized strata, have shaken Yale to its rancid colonial core. Graduate students first began to assert themselves as exploited producers in the postwar knowledge factory during the upheavals of the late 1960s and early 1970s, particularly in the 1972 wave of threatened grade strikes in the Philosophy and Political Science departments. (See my senior essay.) GESO, the current and, historically speaking, the most powerful graduate student union movement on Yale’s campus evolved in part from the experiences of solidarity and managerial intimidation of many TAs during the organizing and contract fights of the university’s clerical and technical workers which led to the fall 1984 ten week strike by the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Local 34’s C&Ts and Local 35’s Maintenance and Service workers. (The history of attempts to unionize Yale clerical workers dates as far back as 1946 and deserves more attention elsewhere.) In the twenty years since the January, 1985 settlement, and in the fifteen since TA Solidarity became the Graduate Employees and Students Organization-HERE, affiliating with the Federation of (Hospital and) University Employees, Yale workers have put forth and fought for a vision of the Yale University and New Haven, Connecticut at odds with that of Levin and his team of corporate transplants – David Swensen, John Pepper, and Bruce Alexander, to name a few. The university has gone to great lengths – giant black curtains, jaunts through sewer tunnels, llamas – to ensure that this vision and the voices of those who share it are unseen and unheard. They have failed.

The last two strikes in particular, like earlier walkouts throughout the 1970s and the famed 1984 strike, which garnered the national spotlight to such an extent that Phil Donahue actually filmed an episode of his talk show from the campus while the strike raged, pitting Yale president Bart Giamatti against union leader Lucille Dickess and organizer John Wilhelm (’67), have successfully and powerfully articulated a democratic and just vision of teaching, work, and learning and a more egalitarian and honest relationship between the university and New Haven. For too long, President Levin and the Yale administration have tried to ignore or silence those who articulate this vision. It’s time for them to start listening or get out of the way.

ahem

But hospital spokesman Vin Petrini said Yale-New Haven already gives so much to the community that a benefits agreement would be additive.

Correction: After much, insert "debt." The YDN sincerely regrets this error, yadda yadda yadda.
And what the hell is wrong with being a little "additive" when you've spent a decade robbing sick people?

I was thinking about trying to get a job somewhere as a delivery guy. Then i read this story, which is horrifying and unbelievable. I don't understand how people couldn't figure out that the elevator was stuck, regardless of whether or not the man trapped inside could speak english. Thank god they found him.

Cablevision, the company that owns Madison Square Garden (and is currently locked in a battle with Time-Warner cable that's keeping about two thirds of the mets' games from being televised) is suing The NY Jets and the MTA in an attempt to stop the stadium on the far west side. I'm opposed to the stadium. I think it's another step in the neoliberal reconfiguration of new york's spatial politics, even if it does ultimately create some jobs, which better fucking be union. But Cablevision's another matter entirely. Cablevision is despicable. Two months ago, they cut off insurance for over two hundred members of Unite Here Local 100 (a union i worked with a few summers back) to try to intimidate/force workers into acquiescing to serious cutbacks in contract negotiations. Please take a few minutes to tell Cablevision that this attack on Madison Square Garden workers is unnacceptable.

Enjoy the weather if you can.

Quotation of the Year

"Being a freshman at life fucking sucks on so many levels." - Ana

Asian Grad Students Fighting Racism In Yale's Housing Policies.

From Friday's YDN

Xiaoye Li GRD '07 said dormitory rules prohibiting individuals
from having overnight guests stay for more than three nights were applied
differently to Chinese and non-Chinese residents. Li said the parents of a
non-Chinese resident in Helen Hadley lived with her for two weeks without
interference from the dormitory manager."Our Chinese students never feel this
type of leniency," Li said.But Reinstein said because dormitory staff leave the
building before 5 p.m., the rules about overnight guests are only enforced when
another student makes a complaint about a violation."It's not an institutional
problem," Reinstein said. "It would seem to be an interpersonal
problem."

What a shamefully lameass excuse for an institution with some of the best scholars of race and racism in the world to make. I mean, we all know that "interpersonal problems" are never infused with and shaped by racial formations or anything like that. God forbid institutional practices should exist in anything other than the vacuum of detatched bureaucratic fiat.

Meanwhile, the GSA pretty much admits it's a useless schill:

Jeffrey McCutcheon GRD '08, the vice-chair of the Graduate
Student Assembly and chair of the GSA's housing and transportation committee,
said complaints about discrimination in dormitories have not been brought to the
attention of the GSA."Typically these problems, especially those associated with
international students, tend to get brought up with GESO representatives more so
than they're brought up with GSA representatives," he said.

And from today's guest-column by two HHH grad students:

When we first arrived in America, we heard a lot of talk about
the values of democracy. Unfortunately, as soon as we arrived in Yale's Helen
Hadley Hall, we began to experience something different: dictatorship and
discrimination.Most of the residents in graduate housing are international
students, because we cannot come and look for an apartment months before classes
begin. We are a captive market, and Yale has taken full advantage of this by
charging us about $500 per month for a tiny 10' x 10' room. We have no dining
hall, but share a kitchen with our floor's 35 other residents, who also share
one men's and one women's bathroom. Even worse, we are charged about $3,000 --
the full amount of one semester's rent, plus a $500 security deposit -- almost
as soon as we move in.This leaves us very vulnerable to abuse by management. For
example, one of our Chinese colleagues moved out of the dorm midyear, found a
replacement for her room as required by the rules and asked for her rent money
back. She was told that she would get no money back, because her "replacement"
had applied independently for a room, and so did not qualify as her
"replacement." This meant a potential loss of thousands of dollars. She had to
protest, causing management finally to return everything except about $300. They
have never explained why $300 was kept. There are no rules about this. It relies
simply upon the whims of the housing manager.Last May, there was a major water
leak in my room, just before I, Xiaoye, left for a trip home. I loaned my key to
a friend so he could protect my belongings. But loaning out keys is prohibited,
so the dorm manager sent me an e-mail that said my room "will be re-assigned to
an incoming student" and demanded, "You must let me know when you will be
available to remove all your belongings from the building." I found this very
threatening and stressful. By contrast, the non-Chinese residents are treated
leniently and do not have the rules so strictly enforced on them...
If the residents of the graduate dormitories were allowed to
elect representatives who made and enforced the rules, we would have fair rules
which protect the comfort and convenience of all the residents. Instead, we have
all types of unfair or unwritten rules being made up by a single dictator. This
needs to change now!We have found that there is only one way to make these
changes: Organize. Organize. Organize. We tried speaking politely with the
administration, and nothing has changed. So now we, together with our union,
GESO, are standing up to demand respect.It is hypocritical of Yale President
Richard Levin to push for greater political democracy far away in our home
country of China, while he himself refuses to allow democracy on his own campus,
where Chinese students are treated like second-class citizens. He should stop
taking advantage of us by charging us high rents for shabby rooms with unfair
conditions. He should also stop refusing to recognize the 60 percent of teaching
assistants who want a union. He should recognize us, and recognize our
union.

Amen.

Echoes

Like alek, i've recently gotten some bizarre search hits.

My favorite: "Feminism AND 1970s AND waitressing AND Grease the movie." I'm the number 1 hit for this google search, thanks to my senior essay, which has nothing to do with John Travolta or Stockard Channing, but go figure.

Tied for most sketchy: "eliana johnson" father
and (ignoring for the moment the dozens of search hits concerning Chloe and its author)
"Breakup Poetry." Who searches the web for breakup poetry?

There have been weirder hits than this, but i have now forgotten them.

"I better shape up
cause i need a job
and the lack, it makes me blue
I better shape up
i am such a slob
and i always act the fool
I don't know what i want. Doo doo doo
I don't know what i want...."
(To the tune of "You're The One That I Want." Get it? Grease? Ok, shutting up now...)

The Times reminds its readers of where social security privatization and immigrant workers' struggles intersect...

Since illegally crossing the Mexican border into the United
States six years ago, Ángel Martínez has done backbreaking work, harvesting
asparagus, pruning grapevines and picking the ripe fruit. More recently, he has
also washed trucks, often working as much as 70 hours a week, earning $8.50 to
$12.75 an hour.
Not surprisingly, Mr. Martínez, 28, has not given much
thought to Social Security's long-term financial problems. But Mr. Martínez -
who comes from the state of Oaxaca in southern Mexico and hiked for two days
through the desert to enter the United States near Tecate, some 20 miles east of
Tijuana - contributes more than most Americans to the solvency of the nation's
public retirement system.
Last year, Mr. Martínez paid about $2,000 toward
Social Security and $450 for Medicare through payroll taxes withheld from his
wages. Yet unlike most Americans, who will receive some form of a public pension
in retirement and will be eligible for Medicare as soon as they turn 65, Mr.
Martínez is not entitled to benefits.
He belongs to a big club. As the debate
over Social Security heats up, the estimated seven million or so illegal
immigrant workers in the United States are now providing the system with a
subsidy of as much as $7 billion a year.

Josh on "shared experiences"

I'm going to venture a guess that Bass' identity as a white conservative
might, bluegrass aside, indeed have something to do with his excitement at the
prospect of neo-confederate secession, and that other Southerners - white
conservatives or not - might be somewhat more skeptical about what features
other than size these "Christian Exodus" types are looking for in their new
community. They might also question the idea that Southerners are all united by
"shared experiences" of the Reconstruction and the Civil Rights movement. Seems
to me that being sprayed with fire hoses for non-violent protest of American
Apartheid and being one of the ones holding the fire hoses are very different
experiences to have of those events, and that the zeal of some to pull out of
the union and found a nation they find more in keeping with their "values" only
evidences how deep that division runs.

phallology

Does anyone else find the Cialis logo's resemblance to a testicle hilarious, or am i just perpetually twelve years old?

(or both?)

Rock bottom is me running through a torrential downpour, shouting Catullus elegiac couplets (8 and 76) in a misogynistic, immature, futile act of self destruction. I'm not there yet, so i haven't hit rock bottom. Thank goodness for small favors, what with the not getting into grad school, and one school not even having the courtesy to alert me to this fact yet, and the continuing inablility to secure employment or move out of my parents' apartment and into something resembling adulthood and the whole lack of a sex life for, like, ever.

Please excuse the wallowing in self loathing/pity/disgust. It seems to be what i do these days. I'm pretty miserable tonight, if you hadn't deduced this already, which i'm sure you have, because pretty much everyone who reads this went/goes to Yale. Hell, some of you actually got in to Grad school.

I'm not sure if this is cathartic or more self destructive than what my behavior patterns have been for the last four months. And i'm a bit murky over where catharsis and masturbation overlap. I should probably go now. Et tu, desinatus obdura.* Oh shit, there i go...

In all seriousness, i'm in a pretty bad place right now and i feel like i'm reaching the end of my capability to deal with it. I've been scouring craig's list for jobs, sitting by the mailbox waiting for a certain unionized graduate school to have the decency to tell me that they've rejected me and not just leave me hanging long after they've begun organizing get-togethers for admitted students (this from the same people who called me up and told me they liked my application, oddly enough, which makes it all the more frustrating cause i really liked their program and now my paranoia's taking over and i envision admissions committees laughing their asses off at my weak application and overweening arrogance.) I've stopped walking because interfacing with the world right now just makes me ashamed of myself, which is so obnoxious of me but i really don't know what else to do. And i'm not moving forward at all. I can't fucking believe it's April already. (Cruellest month and all that shit. I hate TS Eliot. Fucking fascist.)

*Concluding words of Catullus 8. My translation: "and you, steadfast, endure." Context isn't really analogous, since i'm not actually hysterically trying to console myself by imagining myself telling the married woman i've been having a three year affair with and writing pseudonymous misogynist love poems about that she'll never have anyone now that she's left me, and the whole thing's grandiose and ridiculous, so i'm probably just trying to be ironic. At least my blog has footnotes.

guess who i'll never vote for

Two weeks after telling a group of police sergeants he did not
believe the fatal police shooting of Amadou Diallo was a crime, Fernando Ferrer,
a Democratic candidate for mayor, said in numerous interviews yesterday that
those remarks were "careless."
Mr. Ferrer's series of mea culpas around
Manhattan followed days of bruising criticism from black political leaders who
were incensed by Mr. Ferrer's suggestion that there had been an attempt to
"overindict" those responsible for the 1999 shooting of Mr. Diallo, an unarmed
African immigrant. This week, a poll showed that Mr. Ferrer has lost ground to
C. Virginia Fields, the only African-American seeking the Democratic
nomination.

NYC club attrition report.

Coney Island High, Tramps, Wetlands, and even the goddamn Spiral are all gone. CBGB's in a fight with its landlord and maay be the next on the chopping block. Tonic, however, will endure for the near future at the very least.

Fred Korematsu dies

The Times reports on the Minuteman Project, a group of armed vigilantes patrolling la frontera for kicks in an attempt to make migrant's lives that much harder.

"I hope to go out on patrols at night, find some illegals,"
said Mr. McCarty, who had his .38-caliber pistol strapped to his leg as he stood
outside the citizen patrol's makeshift headquarters here in Tombstone, the town
where Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday engaged in a shootout with the Clanton gang in
1881. "I need some excitement. And this is better than sitting at home all day
watching rattlesnakes crawl out of the den."

You'd think you'd figure out that you were doing something wrong when Aryan Nation websites started singing your praises.

The citizen volunteers say they will track and report smugglers to
the Border Patrol. They say they are not vigilantes and will try to enforce a
strict "no contact" rule in approaching Mexicans.

And they need the rifles why?

"You move out here to your 40 acres of Shangri-La," he said, "look
out the window, and what to do you see? Hordes of illegals running from the
bushes."
He has called for deployment of National Guard troops along the
1,950-mile border.

This is a rhetoric of extermination, grounded in a deeply racialized sense of entitlement. The reference to "40 acres" is particularly fascinating given the historical resonances of that phrase. (Wilcox is white.) Besides the demonization of undocumented immigrants as terrorists, an increasingly common tactic since September 11, as the right has attempted to use the deaths of undocumented immigrants like those who washed dishes at Windows on The World to foment hate campaigns against people in the very same situation, there's a sense here that migrants' presence is intolerable because of the visible disruption to the national discourse of racial ownership, the myths we tell ourselves about the West and Europeans' right to it, and, again a deeply racialized understanding of who belongs where.

Hundreds of people died trying to cross the desert last year. Maybe this year, dedicated activists like Chris Wilcox will make that thousands.

"I'm restless," Mr. McCarty said, leaning against an adobe fence in the midday
sun. "I needed something to do before I drove my wife crazy."