Just learned that my sophomore year roomate Brian is now a major league soccer player. That's pretty awesome. He even has a whole article written just about him. Wow.

Looking out my parents' window, i saw a pair of mourning doves sitting on the air conditioner of the apartment next door. Cool.

Really not what i need to read right now.

Pitchfork gives some props to Desmond Dekker, who deserves them. Given the multitude of Dekker comps already available, I'm a bit skeptical about the need for a new one, though most tend to pad the last few tracks with mildly execrable late '80s/early 90's covers Dekker did of his own work with the remnants of The Specials. This comp seems to be no exception to this trend, though it does have some stuff on it that I've never heard before.

Serendipity

From the Chicago Defender, August 3, 1946...

Yale Culture Unsullied By Use In New Haven

NEW HAVEN, CONN -- The sweet light of reason emanating from the accumulation of culture at Yale university, seems well confined behind the ivy walls, according to a survey of race relations and community conditions in this city which is the home of the university.

Negroes find that "race prejudice is very subtle and it slaps you in the face when you least expect it."

Rev. R. A. G. Foster, pastor of the 126-year-old Varick African Methodist Episcopal Zion church, said that Yale seems to exert little influence on city politics and has only refined racial prejudice.

Housing for the 7,500 Negro residents is bad, they testify, and has been since World War I.

The percentage of Negroes in skilled and professional jobs is inordinately small. There are four school teachers, two social workers in state employ, two clerks in city offices and three or four personnel workers in industry.

There are three policemen, no city firemen, no bus or trolley car drivers.

"Integration Genuine"

The Winchester Arms company, however, employs 900 colored workers or about 17 per cent of the laboring force. The publicity director claims that "integration is genuine."

Prices, rents and accomodations are major problems. Mayor William Celentano, elected "by an Italian awakening" has set up a "Fair Rent Committee" but it has been handicapped by lack of state action.

Sections of New Haven, especially that near Yale's New Haven hospital, "are cesspools of disease and crime" according to the mayor.

To examine the school system and make recommendations for improvements, he revealed, a university expert has been called in. He is Dr. Julian Butterworth--of Cornell University.

We'll skip the obvious and cheap correlations and instead attempt to historicize this document. This is a portrait of a New Haven still relatively untouched by the later throes of the Second Great Migration, which would see the African-American population of the city surge by the end of the 1960s. This New Haven has not yet experienced the upheavals of Richard Lee's urban renewal projects and "Kremlin on the Green." And this is also written from a genteel perspective apparently sympathetic to the proto-"culture of poverty" discourse of "disease" and "crime" infesting the Hill and Oak Street which could only be expunged by the razing of an entire working-class neighborhood and its replacement with a highway to nowhere, which would only intensify housing woes into the 1960s and 1970s. (Also note the reference to Varick AME Zion, now David Lee's church, which i also found a great deal of mention of in the notes in the back of the Baltimore Afro-American during the war years. This isn't surprising, as the church, as the article notes, has been around and important for a long time.) I find this article interesting because it fills in some of the blanks that Deborah Elkin refers to in her dissertation, suggesting not only what kinds of discrimination the few black workers at Yale faced on the job, (the most prestigious were often bartenders in frat-houses) but also how the middle class African-American luminaries of the city understood the university's role in city politics entering into the Lee years, in which the university would play a very direct role in much of the new cartography and dislocation.

The folks at the Village Voice, the increasingly corporatized "alternative newsweekly" to end all "alternative newsweeklys" are poised to strike to defend themselves from massive managerial takebacks. Gawker carries the whole press release. These workers are members of UAW Local 2110, the same local which includes the TAs and adjuncts at NYU and those TAs organizing at Columbia. Here's the press release, via Gawker.

Village Voice Workers Poised To Strike

NEW YORK: Faced with a harsh and insulting proposal from management, workers at The Village Voice — the nation’s largest alternative weekly — are prepared to walk off the job for the first time in the newspaper’s history.

As tense negotiations continue and a contract deadline draws near, the Voice’s salespeople, designers, photographers, editors, and writers are united in the face of management’s attempt to roll back hard-won benefits, undermine their bargaining power, and erode their ability to support their families.

In negotiations for a new contract to replace the agreement
that expires at midnight on June 30, Voice management has:

· demanded that workers pay more for their health insurance and switch
to a less generous health care plan.

· offered meager wage increases ($15 a week) paid for by reducing
contributions to workers’ 401(k) plans — a “raise” that is unlikely to outpace
inflation for most workers.

· and insisted that terms for work on the Voice’s website be determined in
one-on-one deals between individual writers and the corporation, not through the collective
bargaining that is required in a union shop.

The Voice, which will mark its 50th anniversary this fall, has long been an advocate for social justice—and particularly the rights of workers—in New York City and elsewhere.
Accepting an unjust contract is not how Local 2110 intends to celebrate the paper’s 50th
birthday. And its members are prepared to remind management that there’s no
party if workers aren’t invited, respected, and fairly compensated.

Any and all coverage will be much appreciated. Please contact Ken Switzer, kswitzer@villagevoice.com, 646-752-1007, for more information. Thanks.

British vs Monkeys

Best Journalism Ever.

You Must Learn

All 53 high schools in Philadelphia, the city where i was born, will begin requiring all students to study African American history in order to graduate. Complaints have come from some who ask why other histories are being relatively ignored, and these strike me as valid questions, but do not constitute a reason why making African American history an integral part of the curriculum should not occur. Indeed I emphatically believe that students should study this material in high school.

That said, I know nothing about the text they are using, and I have some worries about the ways in which this class will be implemented. If this one course is the only time at which the history of the U.S. nation-state will be understood through the experiences and understandings of people of African descent, this is a grave problem. This class could allow schools to teach history to students in ways which challenge the traditional and very problematic historiographies we usually are inculcated with from high school textbooks. It could be a way to examine the central role not only of racism, but also of the intellectual trajectories and social organization of people of African descent in the roots and expansion of global capitalism, the European colonization of Africa and the Americas, and the political, ideological, economic, and cultural formation(s) of the post-colonial and neo-colonial states of the Western Hemisphere.

If this course looks solely at African American history within the narrow prism of the U.S. nationalist imaginary, this is a problem. The histories of Africans in America need to be understood within the larger framework of the African Diaspora. It is the history of U.S. nationalism which ought to be reconsidered in the context of this diaspora rather than vice versa. Similiarly, if the "new emphasis on historical African-American figures like Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells and Dr. Charles Drew" is a simple hagiography which refrains from grappling with what people like Douglass and Wells actually wrote and did, adding them to a pantheonic canon rather than reaching some understanding of the ways in which their lives and their work disrupts that canonical history and necessitates far more complex and nuanced understandings of the histories of work, frontier, and the political, then a crucial opportunity will be squandered.
(I'm excited about the African component of this program the Times article hints at.)

I want to reiterate that I don't think this course alone is in any way sufficient. The histories of Chinese and Mexican immigrants and their descendents -- two groups mentioned in the article in reference to critics of the curriculum change (and those of the Mexicans and Indigenous peoples who lived in the massive areas conquered by the US from Mexico in 1848 or purchased in 1859,) for instance, are also histories high school students should have access to. The names and dates/dead white guy panegyric curricula most high school students in this country study needs to be discarded in favor of more difficult, but ultimately more rewarding ways of understanding the past(s) and present(s). This program in Philadelphia can be an important first step in reworking the ossified history of American exceptionalism and encouraging youth to chart new histories and explore the possibilites for collective action that they make possible.

i need to start remembering to do this on fridays

iTunes Monopoly Capital shuffle hysterics

Madvillain - "Rainbows"
The Homosexuals - "Toto Rello"
The Abyssinians - "Satta Massagana"
Charlie Parker - "Now's The Time"
Dead Prez - "I Have a Dream, Too"
Husker Du - "No Promise Have I made"
Errol Alphonso - "Chant Jah Victory"
Non-Prophets - "Disasters"
The Vaselines - "You Think You're a Man"
Meat Puppets - "Aurora Borealis"
The Cure - "I'm Cold"

I looked at several apartments yesterday, the first overpriced but in a cool neighborhood, the second blocks away from one of my best friends, and pretty affordable (500/month each if we could find a 3rd roomate) but owned by a woman who spoke of her aversion to "Section 8" people and was clearly looking to gentrify rather than coexist (if such is even possible in such situations) with the neighborhood in which she'd purchased property. She also wanted credit card numbers and expiration dates, which seemed odd, given that i wasn't ever planning on paying rent via Mastercard, and was under the impression that that wasn't a part of routine credit checks. All that, combined with ugly carpeting in all the bedrooms and pretty small bedrooms in general, led us to pass on the place. Also, it was at least half a mile, probably more from the A/C and the only train nearer was the G, which is sort of useless when you work in Manhattan, and it's a pretty sucky train regardless. So the hunt will continue, and the prospects of me moving out of my parents apartment prior to hitting 24 (two weeks from today) diminish accordingly.

Which reminds me, although i don't think she reads the blog, today has been my mom's 60th birthday, and I hope it continues to be a good one.

The New Pornographers show was pretty good, though the sound where we were sitting kind of sucked and we couldn't see much because the folks in front of us were standing up and we happened to be sitting under a tree. The set list was impressive, and people watching in prospect park was illuminating. The 3$ Bill was awesome, and "It's Only Divine Right," "Mass Romantic," "The Body Says No," "Letter From an Occupant," and "The Slow Descent Into Alcoholism" were all incredible.

Let's Call It Love

Sleater-Kinney/Dead Meadow was fantastic. S-K played all of The Woods except the final track, gave hundreds of folks who'd never seen them before the near-religious experinece I had the first time I saw them, and Brownstein, Tucker, and Weiss blew the rest of us a way with even more energy and fury than they'd shown in any of the previous times I'd seen them. This is appropriate - The Woods is an angry, ferocious, bitter album, but, as I've said before, it's also about breaking through chaos and disorder and forging new paths of collectivity, solidarity, and fucking FUN, and if that wasn't what was going on on some level while gaggles of queer teenagers moshed to songs about September 11th surreal disconnectedness and finding liberation through jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge, then i really have no idea what was going on and should probably not be going to grad school to study, among other things, Popular Music.

High points of the night were many, but one of the most awesome things I've ever seen happened as S-K came out for their second encore. Corin Tucker picked up the mic, said "this is for Glen," and then the band ripped into ex-Misfits frontman and Jersey legend [Glen] Danzig's 1993 post-horror-rock anthem "Mother," (which my brother totally loved) and played it way, way, better than Danzig ever did. (According to the Boston Herald, they did this there too. This in no way diminishes the sheer rockitude.)

I think i want to write a longer piece of extended work on Sleater-Kinney and Bush II U.S. One Beat and The Woods are both incredibly rich works, pregnant with nuanced and biting critiques and compelling connections that i would like to explorte more than I have here. I was thinking about this during the long guitar solo on the track from which this entry derives its name. That, roughly translated means I am a dork.

I love that band.

SCOTUS Loves Gentrification

It's a victory for bourgie technocrats nationwide

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A divided Supreme Court ruled that local
governments may seize people's homes and businesses against their will for
private development in a decision anxiously awaited in communities where
economic growth conflicts with individual property rights.
Thursday's 5-4
ruling represented a defeat for some Connecticut residents whose homes are
slated for destruction to make room for an office complex. They argued that
cities have no right to take their land except for projects with a clear public
use, such as roads or schools, or to revitalize blighted areas.
As a result,
cities now have wide power to bulldoze residences for projects such as shopping
malls and hotel complexes in order to generate tax revenue.
Local officials,
not federal judges, know best in deciding whether a development project will
benefit the community, justices said.
"The city has carefully formulated an
economic development that it believes will provide appreciable benefits to the
community, including -- but by no means limited to -- new jobs and increased tax
revenue," Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for the majority.
He was joined by
Justice Anthony Kennedy, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G.
Breyer.
At issue was the scope of the Fifth Amendment, which allows
governments to take private property through eminent domain if the land is for
"public use."
Susette Kelo and several other homeowners in a working-class
neighborhood in New London, Conn., filed suit after city officials announced
plans to raze their homes for a riverfront hotel, health club and
offices.

striking=terrorism

at least, according to the Hotel Industry. And you thought it was just GESO who had to deal with this level of hyperbole...

David Scypinski, senior vice president, industry relations, Starwood Hotels and Resorts, says the effects of widespread labor action in 2006 could be devastating. “It could be 9/11 in a different wrapper. It could create a chain of events that hurts the industry and hurts the economy,” he says, referring to the biggest worry that people in the meetings industry have about 2006 — a national hotel strike. “Obviously there is a lot of saber-rattling right now,” Scypinski says. “I don't know how far it will go. We never in our days of being in this industry have seen this happen before.”

"C'mon Schwartz!"

I'm going to sleep now, because i gotta get up and go to New Haven to see about some magazines. But if i were for some reason not going to sleep, I'm sure i'd be watching Spaceballs, which is on tv (attempting to cash in on episode three hype, perhaps) right now, and in retrospect played a role disproportionate to what reason might have circumscribed in shaping my childhood. (Though this may have had something to do with both my next door neighbor and best friend's obsession with Star Wars, my mom's soft spot for The Two Thousand Year-Old Man, and the fact that "Schwartz" is my freaking last name, for crying out loud.

Blogger's "recover post" feature is the best thing ever.

pop quiz, hotshots./lunchtime poll question

Alright. I have no idea if folks are reading this thing, but basically i have acquired, primarily through ADDified caprice, a keen interest in your opinoins regarding the following matter: Which song from a John Hughes film (disregarding the appearance of the Smith's phenomenal "Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want" on the Pretty In Pink OST, which is way too powerful of a song to justify comparing it to the more standard 80's compilation fare below) do you like the most? Here are the options:
"If You Leave" by Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark, from the Pretty In Pink OST. (I had to look the artist up.)
"Don't You (Forget About Me)" by Simple Minds from The Breakfast Club

(cue Iron-Chef style panegyrics)

Rooting around in the closet looking for a lead cable for my newly repaired guitar, i instead found my 24 year old stuffed bunny, the creatively-named "Bunny," which I've had pretty much since i was born and had thought lost for good about seven years ago. This discovery made me kind of happy - it's good to know that a fuzzy, inanimate object that meant more to me than several of my friends when i was growing up is still existant, albeit a little dusty from over half a decade spent on the top shelf of the closet. I think he needs a bath. Kind of like i need to find an apartment.

iTunes Shuffle Fun

1. Al Green - "I Can't Get Next to You"
2. Manu Chao - "Desaparecido"
3. Pavement - "Embassy Row"
4. Bikini Kill - "Rebel Girl"
5. The dB's - "Bad Reputation" (holy crap, what a good song)
6. The Flaming Lips - What Is The Light?"
7. Lennie Hibert "Real Hot"
8. China Street - "Rock Against Racism"
9. Dizzee Rascal ft. Wiley - "2 For"
10. The Raincoats - "The Body"

Today seems to have involved bizarre sightings of folks who graduated from my high school before I did, 8 miles on the edge of a rainstorm which never materialized, disorganized thoughts on this week's developments in other people's lives, penurious procrastination pertaining, perhaps, to the promised pixies post, and waiting to hear back from the possible landlords about the apartment in sunet park i am thinking we probably did not get. There will be others, if this is the case -- though it was a great apartment and kind of reminded me in some ways of the one I lived in on Bishop Street for two years.

I have a couple of things I want to blog about in the near future -- that Pixies show, for one, the AFL-CIO fight, for another, and some other stuff that's slipping my mind because it's 2 AM, but which i think I'll probably remember in the morning and curse myself (not really) for omitting here. But I also have books i want to read, and work that needs to get done possibly involving a trip to New Haven Wednesday (Monday being new six feet under, Tuesday being new CD day, and Thursday being Sleater-Kinney/Dead Meadow at Roseland) to procure high quality digital reproductions of the amazing photographs of some of the babies whom I have been researching from the sensationalized and exploitative articles in LIFE and Newsweek and the somewhat more nuanced but wrought with contradiction five-page spread from the April 1946 issue of Ebony. So i'm not sure when i'll get around to posting this stuff, but hopefully I'll do it in a way that makes sense.

George Pataki is apparently intent on making sure the only people who profit off September 11th are the Bush administration.

"Right now, millions of people are coming to Lower Manhattan,
looking for information about what happened here," Gov. George E. Pataki said at
a news conference attended by victims' families, rescue workers, survivors and
local residents. "We want people to come here and be told the right story by the
right people, who are not trying to make money off it."

update

here's the flawed NYT article on the NYU developments. The Times seems to think that the administration's refusal to negotiate, combined with the language of the "Brown Decision," means that GSOC-UAW is somehow starting over from square one. This is wrong for several reasons, the first being that the contract doesn't expire for another two months. But really, the Times is wrong because recognition does not a union make, because as long as graduate employees are willing to fight casualization and collectively build towards a new vision of academic production, whether or not a bunch of corporate shills lends us their imprimatur, while creating difficult obstacles, is not what is going to make or break organizing drives by academic workers. GSOC was organizing for three years before the NYU decision, GESO for over 10. GSOC's current position demonstrates the willingness of the Bush administration and the officers of the imperial university to sacrifice any pretense of democracy, collegiality, and intellectual freedoms in order to crush insurgent articulations of what teaching means, how academic work is ordered, subaltern understandings of what Slick Rick called "The Work of The University." The power to stop them and realize these immanent new forms remains ours.

(Notice, though, how they pledge to follow the Yale model - try to buy us off with steady stipend increases while openly vowing to create a company union.)

I Do Want To Strike, And Now I Might Have To.

NYU, thanking George W. Bush for his propitious recess appointments, moves to take advantage of the Brown decision and proposes to crush GSOC.

New York University announced on Thursday a "proposed
decision" not to negotiate a new contract with its graduate teaching assistants'
union. The announcement comes 11 months after the National Labor RelationsBoard
effectively reversed a five-year-old ruling that NYU was obligedto bargain with
its TA's.The proposal was made in a nine-page memorandum issued late
Thursdayafternoon by Jacob J. Lew, the university's executive vice president,and
David W. McLaughlin, its provost. The memorandum states that theuniversity is
under no legal obligation to negotiate a new contract whenthe current one
expires, on August 31, but puts off a final decisionuntil after a 30-day comment
period.

Michael W. Palm, chairman of the Graduate Student Organizing Committee at NYU and a Ph.D. candidate in American studies, said that the announcement was "disappointing and appalling, but it's not surprising.""We've been prepared for this," he said.

Kill me now.

Pixies entry still to come, I just want to say that the new Go-Betweens album, Oceans Apart, really is as good as everyone's saying. It's at least on par with 16 Lovers' Lane, and i'm enjoying it quite a bit. Even if the "why do people who read dostoevsky look like dostoevsky" line overreaches a bit. Anyway, it's a really good record and everyone should hear it.

This may use the language of anarchist neourbanism, but there's also an undercurrent of city-as-police-state-amusement park which doesn't seem that far away from Giulianist Neoliberalism. That said, it could also be fun, and may be more subversive than I'm giving it credit for, but then again, isn't this the kind of shit that makes the yuppies willing to pay $3000 a month for a Williamsburg apt.?

Had some other stuff i wanted to say, but forgot what it was. Etonces, adios.

Escucha, Escucha! Estamos en la Lucha

The first time i heard that chant was on a picket line at the Congress Plaza Hotel in Chicago, where workers struck on June 15, 2003 to fight the Hotel Owner's imposition of illegal cutbacks. Today, two years later, the strike continues. Support the Congress workers here.

this monkey's gone to heaven

It's drawing on 2 AM and i gotta work tomorrow, but i'll post a full review of the excellent Pixies show later. For now, what you need to know is: Interpol suck live, the Pixies are fucking amazing, Kim Deal's backing vocals (think the oooh-oohs on "Where Is My Mind) are the coolest sounds i have ever heard. Joey Santiago is still one of my favorite guitarists ever. Charles Thompson's face looks broken when he says the "I got a broken face" line. Kim Deal is amazingly cool. The only dissapointments were the lack of, in order, "Tony's Theme," "Crackity Jones," "River Euphrates," "Silver," and "There Goes My Gun" - five of my favorite songs. (I especially love Silver more than rating it fourth would suggest, but i can understand how it would be difficult to fit into a live set.) Also no Alec Eiffel, but i'm ok with that. The "shakeyourbutt" and whistleing on "La La Love You" was fantastic. Okay, more later.

This afternoon i watched the second half or so of Spike Lee's Malcolm X, and when the montage of everyone starting to travel to the Audobon Ballroom over "A Change Is Gonna Come" started, i began crying. I'm not sure why - maybe because whatever problems i have with Lee's film the song and the images were incredibly powerful. Maybe because i have been for the last month working thirty feet away from the shotgun bullets which were lodged in his body and have been surrounded by the courtroom skethches from the trial of his assassins. Maybe it's because i'm a sap and whenever you stick Nelson Mandela in front of a bunch of children and have him say something powerful, i clam up. Maybe it's because I've been a pretty big emotional wreck since like May 2004 and can no longer find rhyme or reason in any emotional responses i have to any work of art in the age of digital replication.

Later on this evening, after watching another annoying episode of six feet under, as i went for a walk, i almost thought i was going to start sobbing in the middle of the street, not because of the episode, which was frustratingly contrived enough to make me want to, but because i was feeling lonely and self-flagellatory. But i didn't. Apparently my cell phone sucks. Like, i just got a text message someone sent me two and a half hours ago, telling me they were getting a busy signal on my phone when they tried to call me. And god knows i wasn't talking to anyone. Damn you, Cingular.

On the up side, i may have found an apartment in Sunset Park. If we can get it, it's a great, cheap place with a lot of natural light and a fair amount of space, not too far from the N and/or D. And tomorrow, I'm seeing the Pixies. And despite inexplicable tear duct malfunctions, my life does generally seem to be coming together a bit and a return to something resembling adulthood seems imminent.

otium, Catulle, tibi molestum est:

At the high school reunion yesterday, Zach P. reminded me of this line from Catullus 51, which is an adaptation of a Sappho poem in which Sappho/Catullus jealously observes the woman of his/her desires flirting with an/other man. Ah, sapphic strometer. The apostrophic line above, roughly translated, means "Leisure, Catullus, is a problem for you." (Otium, "leisure," being the opposite of Negotium, "business.") What does this have to do with the Gang of Four lyric after which I named this blog fourteen months ago? Nothing. Nor is it an accurate representation of my mental state. And i've abandoned, for the most part, my youthful obsession with Catullus's self-centered and misogynistic recriminations. But i'll humbly submit my vertex all the same.

The reunion was bizarre and overwhelming but fun, although my "afternoon subway posse" was mostly absent, and i felt the loss of Lauren and Lucas walking home afterwards. One guy i was friendly with senior year kept saying he thought it was reassuring that we were all the same. I don't buy it. I think we all revert a little in the unfamiliar yet eerily extremely familiar environs of a high school reunion in a bar that used to be owned by people we went to high school with, and I think there has been some continuity between who i was five years ago and who I am now, (I remain a mildly hairy Jewish anarchist named [Redacted], and many formative experiences from ages 0 through 18 or 19 retain their weight but emphatically I don't think we are all "the same." I don't want to get all sappy, and i can only speak for myself, but i think I've been through some pretty intense shit from the pee-on-floor incidents on, and i think i'm a fundamentally changed person in someways because of it. And with the exception of carefully instilled Yalelitism(c) i'd love to expunge from my psyche, i tend to like alot of the ways i've been impacted by all the stuff i've learned and experienced.

I'm going to wisely shut up now and try to figure out apartment-hunting. Et tu, desinatus obdura.

That worked.

Local 11 responds to the EC lockout.

We chose to act in a moderate responsible way. Now, the EC hotels have decided to lock out the workers in four properties effective 5 am on Saturday June 11, 2005: a move that's not just bad for our workers who will lose their paychecks but also for the city of Los Angeles. Just ask our brothers and sisters in San Francisco. Their tourism and convention business has still not recovered from the hotels' decision to lock out the workers late last year.

But the good news is the EC still has time to do the right thing. They can restore our workers' health fund; repay the families for their co-pays and medical debts; and let our workers come to work and provide the outstanding service to which visitors to Los Angeles have become accustomed.

I guess it's a good thing they didn't hire me.

After workers at the West Hollywood Hyatt struck to protest the coercive and unfair negotiating tactics of and working conditions at the Hotel, the Los Angeles EC locked out thousands of workers at other hotels in the city in an attempt to crush the union. It didn't work in San Francisco, don't let it work in LA.

Congratulations, Bono Vox, you're the guy Jesse Helms trots out to put a kindler, genler face on his continued intransigence in the face of the forty year-old victories of social movements which pretty much define "historical bloc." You must be so proud.

Sarcasm aside, this is a pretty why Bono's self-righteous, grandiose Jimmy Carter impression disgusts me. The best possible outcome is a kinder, gentler Empire. What more frequently happens is that it gives an open racist like Helms or a parafascist like Bush a hip (at least to forty year old white people) lawn ornament they can use to look "moderate."

Gee, NYT, god forbid you could actually write about the literatures written by and for working class readers over the past hundred and fifty years in your deeply flawed and otherwise ridiculous piece on class and fiction. Read some Michael Denning, for christ sakes.

And by the way, this:

On television and in the movies now, and even in the pages of novels, people tend to dwell in a classless, homogenized American Never-Never Land. This place is an upgrade, but not a drastic one, from the old neighborhood where Beaver, Ozzie and Harriet, and Donna Reed used to live; it's those yuppified city blocks where the friends on "Friends" and the "Seinfeld" gang had their apartments, or in the now more fashionable version, it's part of the same exurb as One Tree Hill and Wisteria Lane - those airbrushed suburbs where all the cool young people hang out and where the pecking order of sex and looks has replaced the old hierarchy of jobs and money.

isn't classless and homogenized, it just happens to be your class represented as normative and universal. But don't mistake Seinfeld, famous for its Othering representations of ethnicized and racialized subalterned populations as cheap background jokes to the solipsistic faux-upper west side of Larry David's yuppie protagonists' ennui humor, for "classless."

NYC YuppieCult Blog Gothamist shills for the sweatshop magnates. And they disable comments on the post, so readers can't pipe in. It's a shame too, because i wanted to post something snarky about how if Nike lets you design your own shoe, the logical next step could be an opportunity to slum it in the maquiladoras (or whatever they call 'em in Guangzhou and South Korea) and actually make the shoe. Not very incisive, i know, but now i'm more frustrated with the blog itself, for being the "promotional partner" of one of the more evil corporations on the planet and so brazenly abandoning any pretense of "objective" (which never really exists anyway, granted) journalism in the process of kissing Phillip Knight's air-jordaned, made by a Honduran 12-year old, feet. This kind of bloggertisement is pretty reprehensible.

And yes, Pedro Martinez was awesome last night.

The search for an affordable apartment in Brooklyn has begun. Looking with another Yale kid in the Sunset Park/outskirts of Park Slope/Clinton Hill areas at the moment. If anyone has better ideas, lemme know.

New season of six feet under premieres tonight. Times review this morning was good - well, i mean, like, well, written and probably accurate. Critical, not gushy, generally on point. I hope George dies soon. (Well, not really, cause then they'd probably turn Ruth into a gibbering mess. So i hope she dumps his ass soon.) And that they stop the morality play bullshit with claire (first gabriel demas, then billy, then her friend cheating on the SATs, then gabriel demas again, then the abortion, then the whole freaking ou about Mena Suvari's character's sexuality, then "plagiarism," then cocaine, then billy again. Please.)

Saturday's the 5 year high school reunion, to which i've ultimately decided to go. It should be fun and hopefully not too awkward. Then Tuesday is the pixies. And then the thursday of the following week is sleater-kinney, so June should be pretty tolerable.

There are some ways in which being in graduate school at NYU might be less frustrating than being a graduate student at Yale. (I'm talking about the newspaper, not the obstructionist tactics of the administration. We'll see if they are finally going to let a strike happen rather than deal with the union come August.)

But then there's the stuff that might be equally fucked up. I've never dealt with anything like a dean veto of a unanimously approved job search candidate before. In some ways it's worse for the department even than what Yale did to Connie Allen, because it's essentially a big "fuck you" to not only the students and the professor involved, but also the search committee and the entire department, and in this case, the entire Institute for Social and Cultural Analysis (or whatever it winds up being called,) which is the big umbrella department into which all of the cultural studies programs at the university just merged into last week. [Redacted], welcome back to the imperial university.

While I continue to enjoy doing research in the middle of a museum exhibit, I am sometimes inclined to post a sign next to my computer which would read something to the effect of “Not Part of the Exhibit.” That only one museumgoer has actually asked about my work after having stared at me perplexedly compounds the minor and wholly unjustified annoyance on my part. I figured out who the famous professor who every day gets accosted by graduate students who tell her they “love her book” or somesuch is. You can bet I’m very satisfied with myself.

The other apparent tradeoff is that, with one or two exceptions, my fellow researchers seem inclined to compensate for whatever dynamic engagement between librarygoer and library community the Schomburg fosters by having very little to say to each other. This is disappointing, because I am sure that many of the three to ten other researchers in here on any given day (sometimes I’m the only researcher here, which is a little odd) are doing very interesting work, and I’m either nosy or enough interested in other people’s lives and work that I’d like to know what they are doing and who they are. Also, maybe they know things that I don’t or HC doesn’t about the research I’m doing, and could help me find sources or material I wouldn’t otherwise know about. Instead, I’ll continue to wade through a veritable mountain of manuscripts, drafts, letters, brochures, index cards, surveys, tables, articles, and fragments and hope I’m being productive.

I just got back from my mom’s 60th birthday (she looks like she’s 40 and acts like she’s twenty) Motown dance party, which was a lot of fun – friends of the family I hadn’t seen in many years (some not since leaving Philadelphia going on 16 years ago,) friends of the family I saw last month but don’t see enough, family, and my incredibly cool 88 year old former truck drivin’ dance teacher grandmother, with whom I danced, of course. I haven‘t seen my mom, who got to get on stage and sing with the Motown band my dad hired for three songs, be this happy and have this much fun in a long time, maybe ever, so that made me really happy by the transitive property of being happy. And i'm actually lloking forward to the rest of the family stuff that has me pretty solidly booked through sunday.

Pitchfork reviewer feels that Chapelle Show excerpt on new Common album disrupts authentic blackness of "palpable Southside surroundings." Film at 11.

But seriously dude, it's a major label hip hop album whose first single has already recieved massive amounts of airplay on MTV. Do you really think you can get away with pretending this is a Robert Johnson '45 and not looking at it in the context of capital flows and imperial racial imaginaries (Which your comments adhere to quite nicely?) If so, can I have your job?