belated "fuck my iPod" edition, random shuffle playlist

The Sugar Hill Gang. "Rapper's Delight"
Guided By Voices. "Burning Flag Birthday Suit"
Hole "Asking For It"
The Clash "Silicone on Sapphire"
Shellac, "House Full of Garbage"
Nick Drake, "Pink Moon"
The Coup, "Breathing Apparatus"
A.C. Newman "Miracle Drug"
The Wowz "when i die"
Madvillain, "Operation Lifesaver AKA Mint Test"

Hole? I still have that album? And i burned it on to my computer? Wow.

I'm changing my aya email address so that it's now my first name dot my first last name hyphen my second last name @aya.yale.edu. While i think my gmail address is easier to both type and remember, i'm hoping this will make contacting me a little less of a guessing game for people who have reason to do so.

I've been sick all weekend,and trying to get over this ill timed and fairly severe cold, as colds go, by sitting around and not doing too much. Back to work tomorrow -- and this weekend is my mother's 60th birthday party (twenty three days early,) combined with a minor clusterfuck of family obligations and houseguests I just found out about yesterday. So i'm hoping i'm feeling better by then.

I was trying to listen to Doolittle on my Ipod saturady night and it kept skipping tracks - from "I bleed" straight to "Mr. Grieves." Then I made it go back to "Here Comes Your Man" and after two unsuccesful tries, it obliged me and played the song in its entirety, only to then skip for no apparent reason to "La La Love You." No "Dead." No " Monkey's Gone To Heaven". No "Mr. Grieves" No "Crackity Jones." And try as i might, i couldn't get the Ipod to play any of these songs, which have all worked fine in the past. All of which, combined with the poor sound quality of a 128kbps file compared with CD Audio, is making me really frustrated with iPods, iTunes, and I, gevalt.

In LA, students at a private high school are moving their prom rather than hold it in the Biltmore, which workers have been boycotting since November.

The Oakwood prom will now be held Saturday at the Renaissance Hotel in Hollywood, a union-recommended hotel that has agreed to negotiate its union contract next year.

"I believe that the success of this boycott is a huge step toward raising the standard of living for workers across the country, a chance to improve greatly the plight of working class people in Los Angeles," said senior student Elizabeth Landesberg.

The students are encouraging other schools to pull their proms from the hotels involved in the labor dispute. The other hotels are the Westin Century Plaza, Sheraton Universal, Hyatt Regency Los Angeles, Hyatt Regency West Hollywood, Regent Beverly Wilshire, Westin Bonaventure and Wilshire Grand.

Last night after the jazz concert that i went to with Jia Lynn and a friend of hers from college we bumped into these two other Yale kids i'd never met before, and we wound up all going to the Empire Diner, which i hadn't been to since like 6th grade or something when i still felt semi-comfortable speaking to my dad's sister on a regular basis. One of these guys started talking shit about New Haven and how he lived on Chapel and Dwight and heard gun shots all the time and wants to "live in Yale not New Haven" and was tal;king about the new luxury apartment building on Church and Wall that he's going to live in next year. I was extraordinarily restrained given the circumstances.

The other guy, who seemed like a much more decent human being, and i got in to a conversation about graduate student/employee unionization, which is really the first time I've had to "defend" transient teacher and researcher unionization in well over a year. I'm not sure how effective i was, but i realized how awkward it feels trying to speak from a perspective other than that of an undergraduate, which means i've got a lot to work on.

In the space of nine days in June, i'm going to see The Pixies AND Sleater-Kinney. I'm excited.

I've made it through The Woods quite a few times now, and read all the reviews I can find on the subject, and i have something i want to say to music critics everywhere: If i hear one more person reference Led Zeppelin when talking about Sleater-Kinney, i may go crazy.

Yes, Carrie Brownstein's tone on The Woods is muddier and dirtier than on the six previous albums (or at least the four back to and including Dig Me Out. Yes, there are guitar freakouts. Yes, there's an 11 minute song. But The Woods are to "Classic Rock" as The Black Saint And The Sinner Lady was to Scott Fucking Joplin. Deal with it. And then instead of lazily invoking John Bonham so you don't have to talk about the awesomeness of Janet Weiss as Janet Weiss, listen to the actual CD you are supposed to be reviewing and engage it directly, cause there's a hell of a lot more going on "Let's Call It Love" than in "Misty Mountain Hop."

The Woods is about the failure of language and about finding new sites of and paths to articulation, it's about the complete collapse of reason in the post-reality-based-community era ("reality is the new fiction they say/truth is truer these days/truth is man made") it's about the transformative powers of rage and despair, among other things. Write about that, you lazy ossified self-satisfied commodity fetishizers!


Blog's been getting a lot of search hits lately for my name. Which begs the question, who is googling/yahooing me? And what do they want? Show yourself!!!

And don't I know it!

The Ghost of Skasploitation past

This is hilarious.

I actually remember these bands. I bury my head in shame now.

J.Z. Retires! (Zaccagnino, not Sean Carter -- This time.)

I guess he couldn't atke the heat. Or maybe it was the ghost of medical debt past, present, and future. Or maybe his shriveled up little capitalist prune of a cardiovascular system miraculously started beating again. Probably not, though.

Kidding aside, as Phoebe blogs, this brings with it the potential for a big victory at YNHH. I sincerely hope that the new leadership at the hospital treats its workers and its city with the respect and dignity they deserve, sits down with CORD, makes free care available to people who need it without trying to take away their homes and/or paychecks, and whose community strategy is based on mutual respect and charitable relations rather than Vin Petrini's flat-out lies and full page advertisements in the Yale-New Haven Register. In the meantime, I sincerely hope that Zaccagnino spends the rest of his life deeply regretting all the evil shit he's done to working people in New Haven and throughout southern Connecticut.

I meanwhile, will reminisce about the time i nearly knocked someone unconscious with Zac-Buck leaflets during one of two banner drops at Joe Millionaire's "Alumni of The Year" coronation (I don't really feel that bad about it ) and the time i almost chased him down the YNHH/Med School hallway to give him our letter but then didn't, because i suck. Joe Zaccagnino, this one's for you!

Organizers said the conference would be the first to ever take apart the ideology of post-colonialism – championed by such renowned Israel critics Edward Said and Noam Chomsky – which they described as leading to the demonization of Israel.

Since when is Noam Chomsky a postcolonialist? Since when is this the first conference to trash poco? Since when does the Israeli state need any help demonizing itself?

"It's used to completely delegitimize Israel," said Dr. Edward Beck, director of Susquehanna Institute and a co-founder of SPME, of post-colonial ideology. "It has been absolutely embraced by the academy. Edward Said and Noam Chomsky are seen as leading thinkers in the modern era. The [doctrine] has penetrated every single discipline and it's championed by many people who don't understand it and don't critique it."

I am increasingly convinced that Professor Beck leads the pack of those who "don't understand" postcolonial theory. Lumping Chomsky in as a postcolonialist simply because he's antizionist is ridiculous.

Salzman, an anthropology professor at McGill University, defined post-colonialism as, in part, the concept that, "Everything was always wonderful in the Third World and the Middle East until the West came and made things bad."

And this guy actually has a tenure track job? Are you kidding? That's a totally ridiculous and completely false statement, and it reflects badky on McGill University and the entire field of anthropology if people in the field actually think it's acceptable to throw around blatant falsehoods like this.

L-Boogie Redux

Pitchfork gives The Woods a dignified 9.0, but i don't really give a rat's ass, because i was already satisfied with my own reaction to the record. No, what i want to call attention to is this - a new single from Lauryn Hill, which means now i have to obsess about yet more upcoming CD releases. When's the new Coup coming out anyway?

"Entertain," the first song from The Woods leaked by Sleater-Kinney on their website, has been primarily interpreted by critics as an attack on the corporatization and marketing of "indie rock" and on the shift towards empty retro gestures (StrokesVinesFranzKillersJetInterpol anyone?) in place of more politicized and less commercially viable trajectories of rock and roll.
"You come around looking 1984
You're such a bore 1984
Nostalgia, you're using it like a whore
It's better than before
You come around sounding 1972
You did nothing new with 1972
Where is the "fuck you"
Where's the black and blue?
Thus far critics seem to have ignored what strikes me as the most provocative and powerful argument Tucker, Brownstein, and Weiss make in the song, as Tucker howls, "And if your Art is done, Johnny get your gun/Join the rank and file, on your TV dial." The Dalton Trumbo reference and militarized imagery suggest a connection, however subtle, between the mass marketing of consumable alterity and military imperialism. This is a connection i'm still trying to wrap my head around, but which i find intriguing.

On "The Wilderness," Sleater-Kinney blast the DavidBrooksian Red-State Blue State model in a manner which challenges both the construction of the nation state (a family feud/the red and the blue now/it's truth against truth/i'll see you in hell now/i don't mind) and the dreams of secession and flight many liberals wallowed in following November 3rd, painting the dream of hippy cities on the Left Coast as racialized and ultimately failed, one head of the two headed brat which they brand electoral politics. The song curses the darkness, but i think the album is an attempt to ignite a flame.

Nearly three years after One Beat, Sleater-Kinney released The Woods, their seventh full-legnth album, today. I'm six songs into it at the moment, and it's fantastic - more sonically adventurous than its predecessor, but at least as overtly and cunningly politicized. There are shades of Sonic Youth in Carrie Brownstein' s bouncing, undulating guitar lines, but one also gets the sense from songs like "Modern Girl" that S-K could do "Arcade Fire" better than The Arcade Fire. The Woods is a dark, angry, bitter record, but it's also a beautiful one.

Also released today are Common's sixth LP, the Kanye-produced Be, and Steven Malkmus's third solo album Face The Truth which i'm listening to at the moment but don't have anything to say about yet. The lead-off single from Be, "The Corner" is amazing, and tracks like "Chi City," and "The Food" are just as good. This is the album everybody's been waiting for Common to make since Resurrection. Haven't listeneed to the Malkus yet, but i'll get around to it soon.

fucking weird

this happened literally right across the street from the old (new) Moon storefront, at 84 East 10th street.

(as opposed to the old old storefront on 2nd between B and C.)

That the block is now coded as a yuppie haven, just seven years after we'd find human feces on the doorstep whenever we opened the store on saturday, when our nearest neighbors were a barber school and a junk shop rather than expensive restaurants and "young professional" apartment buildings, is a disarming reminder of how rapid and total the changes to the east village's social geogrpahy have been in the last two decades.

Laura Bush on the Holocaust

Mrs. Bush also spent nearly an hour touring the new
Holocaust history museum at Yad Vashem, where she laid a wreath to the dead and
wrote in the visitor's book, "Each life is precious," and "We commit ourselves
to reject hatred and to teach tolerance and live in peace."

Gee, Laura. If only you could have told that to your husband's grandfather, who seemed to disagree with such platitudes rather starkly.

The debate over Prescott Bush's behaviour has
been bubbling under the surface for some time. There has been a steady internet
chatter about the "Bush/Nazi" connection, much of it inaccurate and unfair. But
the new documents, many of which were only declassified last year, show that
even after America had entered the war and when there was already significant
information about the Nazis' plans and policies, he worked for and profited from
companies closely involved with the very German businesses that financed
Hitler's rise to power. It has also been suggested that the money he made from
these dealings helped to establish the Bush family fortune and set up its
political dynasty.

Course, if i had the ADL issuing obfuscatory "clarifications" on my family's behalf, i guess i could make empty proclamations about peace and tolerance on imperial visits to muslim holy sites too.

"if that meant being a man"

i dreamt last night that Lauren was yelling at me for leaving New Haven so abruptly. Which got me thinking that maybe i should have stayed in New Haven - not last night, but this year, that last May, rather than fleeing off to my parents' apartment to wallow in self loathing for four months, I should have cast down my bucket where I stood, found a job in New Haven, and stayed there for the year while figuring out grad school and building a life for myself. The point, i guess, is moot, and what I really need to do is find an apartment. Craig's List is intimidating.

Dustbowl Fugee

I went up to New Haven today for the CORD rally and saw Wyclef rock a crowd of workers for the third time in less than two years. This time he gave us a little Fu-Gee-La to go with our "Ready Or Not." He also played a reggaefied, Freddie McGregor-esque "Knockin' on Heaven's Door." I kept shouting out "Levin's" door when appropriate, but it didn't catch on. Also they played the Sharon Jones record on the PA while we were waiting for Wyclef to come on stage, which was awesome. And the Nation Drill Squad was in the house and on stage with Wyclef, which brought back fond memories of watching them "fly" around the corners during the March 3, 2003 community march to tear down Yale's walls. The whole thing today took place on the empty lot at the end of the route 34 connector, right next to Career high school, in a big pile of dust. The location was thus appropriately symbolic of the past consequences of Yale's imperial expansion in the city.

The hospital campaign is so crucial and so inspiring, for all that New Haveners have already won and for all the victories yet to come. And it was really great to see Grrr for the first time since i moved out of the apartment a year ago, and great to see Justin and Autumn. (And Emily, Thomas, Lauren, Amelia, Matt, and a crapload of GESO and 34 and 35 and 1199 and CCNE people.) Congratulations to all the folks who are graduating this weekend.

I finally finished There Ain't No Black In The Union Jack on the train today. It's an interesting book, even more than a decade and a half after it was published and some two decades after many of the events and social movements Gilroy analyzes rtranspired. There are moments when Gilroy as music scholar is absolutely incredible - see the chapter on Diaspora, Utopia, and the critique of capitalism, and his reading of Culture Smiley and comments about Gordon Sumner and his band of appropriators and on Eric Clapton's admiration for English anti-immigrant racist Enoch "rivers of blood" Powell - and moments when he is less convincing - lumping Madness in with Bad Manners as a racist expropriation of Ska for white folks (I'll buy it from Buster Bloodvessel&co., but Madness's debt to Prince Buster was more than publicly acknowledged -- not only did they name their band after and cover one of his songs, they also wrote a song ("The Prince") in an explicit tribute to the ex-bodyguard turned Jamaican popular music legend. I also have written elsewhere about my disagreement with Gilroy's overly simplistic dismissal of KRS-ONE's BDP-era ouevre as "self-conscious racial pedagogy." I'd also like to post something looking at the rationale by which he arrives at his conclusions about how we need to rework undertandings of the role of class in social movements, though i have no idea when i will be able to get around to this. I'm about fifteen pages into George Yudice's (how do you do accents on blogger?) The Expediency of Culture and i'm finding it provocative and intriguing thus far.

Music:
Prince Buster: "Shaking Up Orange Street" - should be the soundtrack for all New Haven mobilizations. I don't care if it's actually about his studio in Kingston.

McFadden & Whitehead - "Ain't No Stopping Us Now" - because Boogie Nights was on TV tonight and this song is somewhat germane.

happy birthday Lauren

For some reason, i always beleive that every Bruce Springsteen song I've never heard will sound like some musical cognate of or homage to The Clash's "The Card Cheat." Quare id faciam, fortasse requiris? Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior. Ok, maybe "excrucior" is way, way, too strong. It's Catullus, though, and the dude was the biggest drama queen since, like, Dido. [And by Dido i mean the queen of Carthage, not the British chanteuse.]

This entry comes straight from the Schomburg (delayed a few hours for lack of an internet collection) while I await a new box to sift through. There are a lot of things that make the Schomburg an infinitely cooler library than, oh, the Beinecke or even SML Manuscripts and Archives. The only thing Sterling has going for it is that you bump into federation and UOC people everywhere. That’s it. Manuscripts and archives also has some great stuff on strikes of yesteryear, icluding a pretty awesome button collection from 1984, and the entirety of the Donahue transcript, which I’ll probably blog someday, but it, like the Beinecke, is private and restricted to most people on the planet – although both are paradoxically more public than almost any other space on the Yale campus, vaults and all. What I really hate about the Beinecke though is how obnoxious this one guy who works there was to me last year, right before they fucked up my photocopy order and helpd me condemn myself to a very dismal winter break fretting over my ability to get a term paper done that should have been presented to a class a month earlier. Though most of that was my fault. And I never should have taken five seminars in one semester.

The Schomburg’s cool because it’s much more responsive to and integrated into the city and the neighborhood: there’s an exhibit on Malcom X right now and all these court sketches from the assassination trial are hanging from the exhibition space in the Manuscript room and as I’m sifting through the St. Clair Drake papers, people of all ages – senior citizens, school groups, families -- are just wandering around and looking at the exhibit, and it makes sitting in the same place for hours on end sooo much more tolerable than in the dank basement microfilm room or the Beinecke panopticon. Yesterday, there was an adorable baby who was making a lot of baby noise, and it kicked ass. All archives should have babies in them. Thus spake Zachathustra.

boycotts work (LA Times)

Hotels Break Ranks On Union Contract
One signs a deal while the general manager of another urges surrender on expiration date issue.
By Nancy Cleeland
Times Staff Writer

May 20, 2005

A coalition of prominent Los Angeles hotels has suffered a double blow in its yearlong power struggle with the hotel workers' union, as two of nine original members publicly broke ranks on the crucial issue of the contract expiration date.

The Unite Here union is demanding that the contract end in 2006 as part of a campaign to line up expiration dates across the country. That could allow the union to call a national strike as it goes up against national chains, leaders said.

The expiration date has been the key point of contention between the two sides, with the Los Angeles Hotel Employer's Council pushing for a longer deal.

The latest hit to the council came Thursday, when Unite Here officials said they had signed a 2006 deal with the newly renamed Sheraton Los Angeles. The former Hyatt Regency was a council member until it changed ownership this week.

Like pacts recently signed between the union and six independent hotels that are not part of the coalition, the Sheraton Los Angeles contract calls for modest wage increases and a continuation of family health benefits.

More surprising was a plea for surrender sent out by Wilshire Grand General Manager John Stoddard, once a strident opponent of the union. His May 12 letter to fellow council members, obtained by the union and released Thursday, calls for capitulation on the expiration date for the sake of the local economy.