re:location

Well, I finally did it. I am now no longer a resident of the upper west side. I've moved out of my parents' apartment to Sunset Park, Brooklyn. I'm pretty excited about this. Sunset Park is an amazing, diverse neighborhood. My apartment is great - though i need an air conditioner and a bunch of furniture. The next step, though, is figuring out how i actually enroll in graduate school.

The UFCW dissafiliates from the AFL-CIO.

Given the union's track record in many areas, one could make the argument that a lot of what Hansen is saying is pretty hypocritical. Let's hope, for the sake of workers everywhere, that this signals a new direction on the part of the union and its leadership rather than a cynical PR maneuver.

friday iTunes shuffle fun

Charlie Parker - "The Hymn"
The Coup - "Wear Clean Drawers"
Slint - "For Dinner..."
Wilco - "Jesus, Etc."
John Lennon- "Working Class Hero"
The Breeders - "Invisible Man
The Flaming Lips - "Buggin'"
Yo La Tengo - "Let's Save Tony Orlando's House"
Suicide - "Rocket USA"
Curtis Mayfield - "Little Child, Runnin' Wild"

The NYT has a really good (except for the title) article on undocumented day worker organizing conference at Hofstra University on Long Island.

As delegates from 29 worker organizations in 12 states shared
successful tactics and tales of persecution in small groups, some having driven
all night to make the meeting, Mr. Alvarado stressed that many towns had tried
and failed to disperse day laborers through aggressive law enforcement.
"They
send police on horses, police on bikes, and they give tickets for jaywalking,
trespassing, littering, loitering," he said. Even helicopters have been used to
chase laborers, he added, citing practices in Algura Hills, Calif., where he
said undercover cops posing as contractors have been known to transport workers
to out-of-the-way places and leave them to walk back.

Not that it wouldn't be great if the Mets acquired Manny Ramirez (provided they don't have to strip their farm system to do so,) but why in god's name would the Red Sox be stupid enough to trade the best home-run hitter in the AL and the player who is currently leading all of baseball in runs batted in?

Corporate America's Mayor

At Ari Berman's blog at The Nation, a pretty interesting, if entirely unsurprising given Giuliani's project and actions as mayor of this city for eight years, post about Giuliani's lucrative career as a shill for pharmaceutical corporations bent on denying access to generic versions of corporate medicines (often researched at universities by casualized scientists with no control over the patenting and lisencing of the cures and treatments they help create -- Anylan center redux) to people in the global South or the so-called "developing countries." The mayor who built his career on racilized police violence and gentrification-by-gunpoint-and/or-tank-cannon is raking in the millions by continuing to nurture his rewarding relationships with scandal-plagued plutocrats and providing a model for folks like Rick Levin and Joe Zaccagnino to gape at in mute awe.

(Hesistate to point out as well the links between several ONHSA employees and the Giuliani administration, but i won't, because that's not really what this post is about. This, ladies and gentlemen, is what we call praeteritio. Cicero, fascist that he was, was the master at it. But hey, as i asked in 11th grade, Quo usque tandem abutere Giuliani, patientia nostra?)

serendipitous commodity fetishism

I went walking up broadway to try to shake off moving-related stress and grab a slice of pizza at Sal and Carmine's. On the way back down from 116th street, which is where i turned around, i passed by a sidewalk book vendor who was selling an old harcover copy of David Montgomery's important 1967 book Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862-1874 for a very reasonable $10. I've read a bunch of Montgomery's books, met him once or twice, and seen him speak several times, and I think he's pretty brilliant. I'd heard and read great things about the book - I'm pretty sure some of Agnew's FORMAC lectures were relying on it pretty heavily - so i bought it. When i looked at the title page, i found out that the copy i held was actually a first edition, which is pretty cool.

the bosses are afraid

pretty fascinating column by a hospitality industry mogul:

Some Hospitality Businesses feel they are exempt from the possibility of a union organizing attempt. They would be dead wrong. Strong Unions can bring cities to their knees with examples of Los Angeles and San Francisco most recently in the news. And, you are not safe from the type of business you are in, for the Service Sector is all around – the laundries, the parking lots, the janitorial services. We are surrounded!

I find the unpreparedness and complacency within our Industry astounding. The major players spend an enormous amount of money protecting their non-union status or fighting organizing attempts, yet what readily appears on today’s horizon is dismissed by most others. And, they have no excuse, except for perhaps arrogance or wishful thinking,

What you need to do right now is the following:

• Review your internal policy and procedures to ensure that they are being administered fairly, consistently and equally.
• Find a means to do an Employee Relations “check” on your staff, find the areas of discord, meet with your employees, open communication.
• Consider appropriate training for your staff and your Supervisors/Managers, emphasizing proactive Employee Relations.
• Have Legal Counsel/Consultant provide an audit of your business to uncover shortcomings and potential problem areas.
• Task your Afiliations (Chambers, CVB’s, Hospitality Associations) to be on top of issues and prepared to address them for the community at large, emphasizing Workshops, Roundtables, Seminars. Do keep in mind that Meeting Planners will avoid your area and your Businesses with any hint of unrest.
• Become informed yourself. To be candid, I have seen little written or spoken about the “Plum”, which Hospitality represents, which is surprising. But, I do not think you need to be a visionary to figure this one out.

Our employees are our messengers, our representatives who deliver the valuable products and services of our businesses. I would prefer to deal directly with them than through third party representation. Wouldn’t you? Our employees are that most remarkable asset. You cannot afford to be shortsighted in this matter, and, with the proper attention, you might even run a better operation. Let me know your thoughts at: jhendrie@hospitalityperformance.com.

Sieg Heil, NLRB

Dannon Frusion Smoothie commercial:

You have maligned the bagel. Repent or face my wrath.

(Contrary to what Marvin Lender would have you believe, Bagels are supposed to be hard. Anything else is just a roll with a hole in the middle.)

The last several years have seen the resurgence of a veritable host of bands long imploded, dissolved, or otherwise no longer existent. Some have resurfaced for long overdue monetary reward - Gang of Four and Slint (I'm not hating, read on) Others have or are currently recording new work, some of which has been fantastic - viz. Mission of Burma, The Go-Betweens' new album, or the Pixies' iTunes-only single "Bam Thwok." Of course, Charles Thompson aka Black Francis aka Frank Black has openly described the band's reunion as a cash-in, while also promising a new album in the not too distant future, which suggests that the sell-out matrix is woefully innacurate here, which we knew already. The argument that these bands are "taking attention away" from newer innovators (can't find the link) only holds weight for me if these bands reunited are not producing new work but resting on their laurels. But fuck it, even then, why can't the pixies rest on their laurels a little bit? I've been obsessed with the Pixies since i heard this girl I had a huge crush on cover "Silver" a couple weeks after i turned 15. That was nine years ago. Getting the opportunity to see them was awesome, and i almost mean that literally. Mission of Burma play an incredible live show and put out one of the best records of last year. Sonic Youth admittedly never split up, but their last two CDs have been pretty great too. And I really don't think me listening to Murray Street or You Are The Quarry disenfranchises a Xiu Xiu, an MIA, a Lady Sovereign any more than me listening to Sister or Evol or The Queen Is Dead would. What i'm more angry about is the newer bands - like Interpol, The Killers, The Bravery, Franz Ferdinand, and even a Bloc Party or the Futureheads, who are so deeply towing the line laid down by Ian Curtis, Robert Smith, Andy Gill, and Tom Verlaine that their music seems to, to quote the Cool Hand Luke sample introducing Guns 'N' Roses' "Civil Wars," constitute a "failure to communicate." But maybe that's the point. I'll write more about Interpol specifically in a later post, and I'm neglecting the stronger of the two main critiques Sleater-Kinney make in "Entertain." I think it's possible for us to find new meanings in the work of reunited bands by listening in a very different context. And sometimes it isn't, and we want them to disband and go away. (cough. u2. cough.) I don't think you can blame Sonic Youth because Trail of Dead is derivative. I don't think musicians have to stop being 'relevant' after 35 or that a band that's dissolved can't still have something interesting to say.

Big Star's putting together their first new album in 27 years.

The lease is signed.

I have an apartment.

And i'm moving in on Sunday.

Laurel Aitken 1927-2005

Laurel Aitken was one of the earliest and most important stars in the history of ska music and was a central figure, perhaps the central figure, in exporting Jamaican popular music to the British Isles. When i met him in 1998, (he did an in-store at Moon after an energetic performance at Wetlands,) he was warm, outgoing and excited to meet the hundreds of people who came by over the course of the day to shake hands with a legend. I just learned he died last week, and he's already missed.

first observation:
in retrospect, the opening of "Fade Into You" is disturbingly similar to the opening of "Please Let Me Get What I Want."



second observation:
Not so much an observation as much as just me wondering whether there was anything prurient involved in me carrying the "orals" sign during the "dissertation race." (Found the photograph while going through my USB drive. Best action ever. Except for that time at the boathouse. And a couple of others. But it was pretty great.)

I walked to Brooklyn today, from the Upper West Side down to city hall and across the Brooklyn Bridge. There was a bomb scare or something in Brooklyn Heights. Cops everywhere. NY1 van parked on Cadman Plaza.

I walked back across the bridge.

Theoretically i'm signing a lease tomorrow.

you know,

Instead of "As New Haven Turns,"

it would have been much funnier if we'd done the (u)O.C.

Just saying.

upperwesticide II

(It's the new "Weapons of Class Instruction," people!)

Extell and its allies have tried to silence critics in several ways - ripping down many of the things people have posted on the wooden boards, and postering over stuff with movie ads, includling the aforementioned ironic rob schneider poster. They also put up somne of their own propaganda last week, which tried to make the case that the towers did a service to the neighborhood by providing housing for people searchging desparately for "affordable" condominia in the $700,000 to $1 million dollar range. I shit you not. They actually had the gall to put that up a block away from public housing. I recognize that the real estate market on the upper west side is insane, but don't try to claim that you're providing a public service by putting up two massive yuppie condo complexes where every apartment costs like a million bucks in a neighborhood of prewar low-rise apartments and a large cluster of housing projects. That's just insulting.

upperwesticide

The site of the future Extell towers - and the collapsed ex-Gristede's on 99th street has become something of a referendum on the future of the upper-upper west side. In black marker, spray paint, and 8.5x11 computer paper, people have written or wheatpasted their objections to the 37 story towers onto the tall blue wood panels which were put in place to obscure its construction from, and render it innacessible to those of us who walk by it every day. On these planks of wood, people have written their discontent with the developer's project in plain terms - "No Yuppie Condos," "Unsafe at Any Height," "Safeway [the contractor] = Disgraceway." One protestor even pointed out the similarities between the extell development's predicament and an image of the leaning tower of Pisa in a movie poster for "Deuce Bigalow, European Gigolo."

Whether thsi fight becomes anything more than something for city council and state assemnbly candidates to pay lip service to, whether people in the neighborhood can actually build solid coalitions and organize very, very disparate groups of residents to take on the corporation that's putting these developments up remains to be seen. But it will be interesting to watch.

Harry and The Potters are an indie rock band who sing songs about, well, Harry Potter. Check them out. Of the songs up on the myspace site, the ones about Order of The Phoenix stuff (that would be "Stick it to Dolores" and "The Human Hosepipe") work the best, slyly capturing the book's adolescent hormonal rage and bewilderment. The other songs, about the basilisk paralysis epidemic, and being alone over christmas. are pretty good too, but the lyrical content of the aforementioned two pegs down the wizarding world's teen age riot moment better than "wizard chess" communicates the loneliness of preadolescent marginality or "Save Ginny Weasley" conveys the frenzied eruption of childhood catastrophe. There are some more songs here.

friday iTunes shuffle fun

Death Comet Crew - "Interior Street"
Vivian Jackson and The Defenders - "Love Thy Neighbour"
Jean Grae - "Style Wars" (ft. Block McCloud.)
High On Fire - "Silver Black"
Manu Chao - "Clandestino"
The Shirelles - "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow"
The Clash - "Long Time Jerk"
Swell Maps - "Blues #1: Garden of Medals"
Al Green - "Sha La La"
Journey - "Separate Ways (Worlds Apart)" (You know you love it.)

toxic popcorn

scary stuff.

No shit.

John Roberts: Corporate Plutocrat.

"I think he's a pothead. Do you?"
-My mother, to me, on one of my brother's friends.

"What, you don't call people potheads anymore? What do you call them now? Stoners?"
-Ibid.

On the Bayh-Dole Dole

Emory gets hundreds of millions (David Swensen scoffs.) Transient researchers get zilch. And so, probably, do the folks who really need the drugs. Anlyan Center: ATL.

You Know, If I'd Waited a Couple Months Before Getting A Haircut, There'd Be a Really Funny Felicity Joke In There Somewhere.

before and after. (I am a man of a thousand dumb faces.)

Walter Mignolo's forthcoming book (due out in November,) The Idea of Latin America, looks interesting.

Dov Charney is a schmuck.

The VV's Lynn Yaeger has a good summary of some of the very serious problems many folks have with American Apparel, the trendy, supposedly anti-sweatshop clothing label currently invading lower manhattan and downtown brooklyn.

In September 2003, American Apparel workers began organizing with UNITE to address concerns like no paid time off, problems with production methods, conflicts with supervisors, and lack of affordable health care. (The company's Web site brags that the company will refer workers to free health clinics—wow, thanks a lot.)

In response, according to behindthelabel.org, Charney resorted to time-honored bad-boss techniques: interrogating and intimidating employees, distributing anti-union armbands (and T-shirts!), holding captive meetings, and worst of all, threatening to close down the plant altogether if the drive was successful. The union filed charges with the National Labor Relations Board, the result of which was that the company had to promise to drop its union-busting tactics, but for now, at least, the union drive is derailed.

So that's the company's labor record. Now, what about the sex harassment stuff? At this writing, three employees have filed two suits alleging, among other things, that Charney invited an employee to masturbate with him, gave an employee a vibrator as a gift, exposed himself to an employee, conducted business in his underpants, and instructed an employee to offer a shopper a job on the spot because he wanted to have sex with her.

Funny. The way i remember it, Giuliani built his career on race, fear, and gentrification, with liberal doses of corruption. Then he capitalized on a whole shitload of death and destruction. How fitting that such is David Brooks's definition of the politics of courage.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Gitmo

[this entry has been edited. I added some more at the end and changed around a sentence or two.]

2003's Harry Potter and The Order of The Phoenix followed in the wake of the very dark turn at the conclusion of 2000's Goblet of Fire, but, released just a few months after the invasion of Iraq, seemed pregnant with meanings not present int the first four books. As the threat of terror loomed, the ministry of magic, attempting to stamp out criticism and dissent, installs a fascist dictator at the head of Hogwarts, whose rather brutal discipline inadvertently incites Harry and friends to surreptitiously organize a clandestine revolutionary organization, much like that which his older friends have created outside the school's walls to battle the "Death Eaters," bent on preserving and returning to the school's (and the nation's) idealized halcyon days. Ultimately, the state's attempts to suppress the threat posed by Voldemort and his Death Eaters collapses when the villains invade the Ministry itself in an attempt to procure the prophecy which says Harry and Voldemort have to fight eachother to the death. People die, shit gets crazy, state hegemony gets disrupted, nothing will ever be the same again. Etc.

In Half Blood Prince, the terrorist threat looms large over Britain. Explosions, assassinations, and torture are commonplace, and the Ministry of Magic, powerless to halt the reign of terror, instead arrests and imprisons innocents in ghastly centers of detainment and madness simply to produce the reassuring illusions of stability and progress. The new Minister of Magic wants Harry to be his "mascot," a silent, pliant Morale booster. Granted, in a David Horowitzian turn (or perhaps a Jon Butlerian one), teachers within the wizarding world's institution of social reproduction/higher education are frequently duplicitous and occasionally flat-out treacherous in their alliances with the forces of evil and use of forbidden magic. And Rowling's is clearly an overly sympathetic account of "the good guys," even as Harry spurns the ministry for their despotic tactics and seems to be gravitating towards Buffy-style "anarchism"

The figures of the tortured, and the unjustly imprisoned, as well as the spy and the double agent have been central to previous books in the series but have assumed a new centrality in Order and Half-Blood Prince, infused, perhaps, with the urgency and horror of the current predicament of articulating a (neo)liberal British nationalist fantasy in the era of "7/7," G8, infinite detention, and the spectre of Abu Ghraib. Yet theirs is a centrality of the marginal -- a palpable absence, but an inability to speak. There is no resolution here, either for the metaphor for Operation Whatever The Fuck It Is These Days or for the book itself, just a lot of death, and fear of what's to come.

Whoop, whoop, that's the sound of the Police

Being a brief account of some bands and some antics at this year's Siren Music Festival, which was brought to you by the US Army and Clear Channel. (No wonder the village voice staff might strike.)

(That the July 4th Yo La Tengo/Malkmus/Laura Cantrell show was sponsored by, among other evil corporations Marriott, was similarly disarming.)

I was kind of nonplused about this year's siren lineup. Compared to three years ago, most of the bands were drab, cookie-cutter A&R wet dreams of what "indie rock" should sound like. (It's possible that they were competing with Pitchfork's Intonation festival for bookings.) I'm frankly pretty sick of the post strokes NYC "indie" explosion, and i need to hear a symphony. But i do kind of like the Siren Festival, and Coney Island and the beach are a lot of fun. And who knows, maybe i'd meet a nice young post-anarchist intellectual and she'd be all like "hey baby, let's go start a committed antihierarchical relationship." (Didn't happen, but whatevs.)

So i jumped on the D-train, Half-Blood Prince in hand, and arrived just in time to hear almost all of Dungen's set, which was pretty great. Between songs the bassist said "we came here all the way from Sweden, and you don't understannd a word we are saying. Good thing for you we're such a good band." Yay, ironic self-deprecating humor. Seeing Gustav Estes rock his flute made me feel proud of my former floutist self.

I went for a walk on the beach during Brendan Benson's set, but came back for some of it. Didn't doo too much for me. I liked when they played MIA's "Bucky Done Gun" on the PA afterwards though.

Spoon's set was tight and impressive and energetic, but i spent most of it being angry at the asshole fratboys a few feet in front of me who were slam-dancing, "skanking," and loudly shouting obnoxious shit at the band, i.e. "Fork! Oh, Spoon, my bad Spoon! SPOON." Real great use of ironic mislabeling of kitchen utensils, shithead. I was also worried about the rather drunk gentlemen next to me, who had, needing to drain their bladders of the 64 oz cups of cheap, watered down budweiser they'd been drinking and threatening to poor onto the heads of passersby, had urinated into the empty cups and set them on the ground, inducing fears of spillage from all of us whom the dutifully and courteously warned of the hazard.

What the hell is up with me and impromptu urinators, anyway? Am i some kind of pee-freak magnet?

oh dear

Charisma Carpenter and Steve Guttenberg? Now that's television!

Mughal vs Muggle

Do i take time off from Chatterjee to read Half-Blood Prince or postopone the Potter to the post-postcolonial?

tall buildings shake

When workers were tearing down the now closed (union shop) Gristede's to start building a 37-story yuppie condo building on 100th and B-Way today, the builing collapsed on 10 people and burined 5, including a 7 month old baby. Everyone's alive, but I definitely agree with the folks who are opposed to what the Extell corporation wants to do to this area, which is an economically and ethnically diverse area with a large Latino community centered in part in the series of housing projects to the east, between Amsterdam and Manhattan Ave.

It's sad that the Gristede's is gone, but it's clear that Extell's condo - and the subcontractor they've hired to demolish the Gristede's, aren't safe or right for this neighborhood. The upper west side has had more than enough stripmallification, let alone gentrification, for the past forty years and the next, thank you very much. Folks who want to "develop" the neighborhood should be thinking about how to make housing and food affordable, and stregnthen community organizations, not build more condos, CVSDuaneReadeRiteAids, or CommerceChaseBanksOfAmericas.

Other weird things that happened in New Haven today:

1.The (very cute) little girl who freaked out over the (very cute and well-behaved) dog in Ashley's and started crying.
2.Doug Rae sitting at the table next to us.

Hello New Haven, Goodbye New Haven

Unemployment hasn't felt this relaxing in years. I'm now done with my job, the material from the Schomburg, the NYPL, and SML having been delivered to the professor for whom i have been working these last three months (which have on the whole been engaging and productive.) Seeing New Haven for what will probably be the last time for the next while (unless you guys go on strike again or something) was good, despite the hordes of Explovites bearing shopping bags. Glad i got the chance to see Phoebe and talk union for a while.

Now to find an apartment, figure out what the hell is going on with grad school and GSOC, and read as many books as i can between now and September.

NYC IMC reports back from the NYU administration's "town hall" meeting.

The dialogue was foreclosed when Sexton, accused of filibustering when he continually responded to each speaker with long-winded and convoluted defenses of the administration’s position, stated that the administration will no longer recognize graduate assistants and teaching assistants as workers and would therefore no longer recognize the union as the appropriate “voice mechanism” for students, thus hiding behind the National Labor Relations Board decision in 2004.

Even though the university may continue to recognize the union despite the NLRB ruling, Sexton said the university will continue to grant increases in stipends and to provide healthcare and other benefits to graduate students without the union. Many participants noted the irony of Sexton’s promises, pointing out that the union is the sole reason for increased benefits enjoyed since the inception of the first contract. Supporters added that graduate students seek not only benefits (or, in this case, a promise of benefits), but a strong, independent mechanism for democratic participation in their working conditions, which can only be guaranteed through their labor union.

It is clear that Sexton and the NYU administration have already made their decision and that the Town Hall meeting, while a tremendous outpouring of labor solidarity, was merely the façade of dialogue. The community has no choice but to find other means for the voice of its collective will to be heard.

It was either Keanu or Debord who said "I know deja-fu."

EDIT: here's another account courtesy of Phoebe (who got it from the man Abbey used to call "Tony Dugs", who pulled it off Inside Higher Ed. Which is where the link goes to. Basically, that was an excuse for me to say "Tony Dugs.")

This week's Six Feet Under was actually watchable (except for the nate-maggie bs and keith-turning-into-his-father trope). This is in part because of Patricia Clarkson, in part becuase they seem to have cut back a bit on the "Claire as five year old in twenty-one year old's body" trope, and Ruth and George finally split up, making me less irate about the abominable george-freaks-out flashback from the premiere. If killing off a previous guest star is what it takes to make the show less crappy, though, then the writers may run out of options before the season ends, at which point Gabriel Demas clearly returns from the dead as a vampire and tries to eat Cordelia and Nate finds his true calling as a wisecracking sportscaster opposite the boyfriend from Don't Tell Mom, The Babysitter's Dead. Then he does the Babysitter's funeral, of course.

Kill Your Landlord

It's been a month now since i started apartment-hunting, and right now, after seeing over a dozen apartments in five different brooklyn neighborhoods, i'm pretty much right where i started. The first apartment we looked at was easily the best, and the guy with whom i am looking and i were both dissapointed that we didn't get it. Stuff in the same price range either isn't as big, as well-lit, or is just completely run down, as in the case of one apartment we looked at today in Kensington and another, a three bedroom for $1250 which was not only in real bad shape, bathroomwise, but was also right next to the BQE and extremely noisy because of its proximity to said nightmarish expressway.

Some of the landlords we've interacted seem like perfectly nice people, but these folks are by no means in the majority. (And no, i'm not advocating murder in the title of this post, just quoting the Dead Kennedys -- perhaps as covered by The Coup.) One woman who owned a three-story building on Tompkins Ave in Bed-Stuy complained that we were only the second "good tenants" to look at the place, in the middle of a working-class African American/West -Indian neighborhood, because everyone else was "on section 8." (Is it even legal to refuse to rent to someone because they are recieving section 8 vouchers?) She was clearly interested in making Bed-Stuy wealthier and whiter at the expense of its current residents, and kept describing the neighborhood in terms of its proximity to gentrified Fort Greene.

Then there's the ad on craig's list which demands that any inquiries concerning the 2 bedroom sunset park apartment in question come from people who aren't on "welfare" and demands that applicants supply job and salary information prior to even being allowed to look at the place. I stooped yesterday to a low enough point that actually responded. Haven't heard back.

I saved post 700 for the occasion of my 24th birthday. Which is today. I am older than the entire world except for Alek Felstiner. I am extraordinarily old.

The birthday, which is technically sunday, but which i celebrated tonight, has been awesome. Last year, i did nothing, which made me really sad and added to this feeling that i was letting my life slip through my fingers and wasting away my youth a la Blind Melon's "No Rain." So I'm really glad that this year I got to spend time with good friends, eat good food, and see a film involving really adorable penguins and a way overdone and overly artful uber-anthropomorphized penguin sex scene. No, i'm not kidding. We're talking tasteful zooms. Also, the baby penguins who were walking around with their wings/flippers extended were adorable.

Even got gifts -- a card which almost made me cry involving a monkey, (of course,) a black tee-shirt, and extremely personalized mix cd which is ridiculously cool.

Tomorrow the apartment hunt continues. Hopefully we will find something soon.

About a month ago, I went to see a jazz show with a friend (and a friend of said friend) down on Hudson Street, below Houston. On our way out, we ran into two kids I had never met before who had both also gone to Yale, a year behind us. Of the two, one seemed like a pretty decent person, for someone who didn't like GESO, anyway - (although he was fairly open-minded and willing to engage in conversation about graduate student-employee unionism at 2 in the morning, so I give him some props.) The other guy, whose name I forget, not so much.

He told us he was living in New Haven for the summer, then finishing his undergraduate work the following semester (and over the summer.) Hearing this, I became enthused, because New Haven in the summer is pretty awesome. I recommended that he find a place way far away from Yale and live there and have ridiculous amounts of fun. At this point, relations soured. He cringed, informed me that he didn't want to live in New Haven, but "in Yale," and confided in me that in his apartment last year "all the way out" on Dwight and Elm, he heard gunshots all the time. The next year, rather than moving off campus, he'd be relocating to the toney Eli, the new luxury apartment building on Church and Wall across from the Chase Bank.

Tactless idiot that I am, I nevertheless somehow managed to avoid a loud and obstreporous response to his remarks. I even supressed a chortle when he later asked what it meant to be pompous in:re the individual formerly known as MPM. But after reading this, it seems as good a time as any to ponder the origins and implications of this particular and particularly Yaleic discourse about New Haven as a space simultaneously accesible/to be exploited & enjoyed and one which is to be feared, avoided, excluded, simultaneously a designer drug, a virus, and a quaint atavism, striving to be worthy of its ten thousand Yalies. And yet theirs is the life of Zagat, structured on difference profound, and, in their formulation, unbridgeable. It's good practice for later migration to New York, but don't get too attatched. At home s/he feels like a tourist. Dink Stover as wealthy Greenwichian mallgoer.

This ideological formation has attained at least a partial hegemony among Yale undergraduates, however frayed and contested that hegemony may be -- this remains the default, perhaps peppered with a yen for liberal electoralism and a burning desire for a cushy internship, whether on the Hill (Capitol, i mean) or with Bruce Alexander himself. Future attempts to organize large numbers of undergraduates without the aid of a fast-approaching strike will clearly continue to struggle with what we can no longer rightfully term "apathy."

Of course, this hegemony frays somewhat along the lineaments of class, sexuality, race and gender, as constructed within the nexus of Yale's imperial relationship with its host city, though Stuart Hall, grappling with the sucess of Thatcherism and racism, long ago warned us that there is no simple correspondence between class and ideology, and the constant negotiations of privilege and deprivation suggest both a greater complexity and possible points at which organizing might intercede and find opportunity to maneuver. (The success of financial aid organizing by undergraduates last year exemplifies such a possibility.)

I want to historicize this formation though. I want to figure out where it comes from and how we all swallowed it, and too what extent we all actually did. And then i wanna shove it down the throat of the nearest university president/bruce A. analogue.

(Which is to say that i would love to write more here, but it's very late and i have a somewhat busy day tomorrow.)

I got a haircut today which left me with a great deal less hair than i am used to. Hopefully it will grow back soon so i can start feeling normal. I never know how to act when my hair's all short. I'm sure this is all very masculinist somehow, but i intend it less as such and more as an illustration of my aversion to haircuts, (or is it hairs cut?)

The London bombing is horriffic and upsetting. Giuliani's brazen attempt to extend his global brand on top of the ruinage is wholly unsurprising, and Blair's claims that the G8's colonial pronunciamentos are the civilized antithesis to terrorist barbarism dishonor the memories of the dead in attempting to obfuscate the far more complex relationship between imperial capital, colonial power, and radical militarist fundamentalist insurgency.

And it's hurricane season again.

Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose.

Apartment Hunting, take, like, twelve.

Wish me luck

The show was good. Cantrell's backing band was superb (Ana swears her singing was a bit flat though.) Stephen Malkmus walked on stage in a Mets hat (and the Mets beat the first place Washington Nationals, by the way) and played a really tight, energetic, strong set consisting primarily of stuff off the excellent new record Face The Truth. The highlight of Yo La tengo's great set for me was "Stockholm Syndrome," though "Autumn Sweater" and "Tears Are In Your Eyes" were similarly wonderful. Their set was cover heavy - the Beach Boys (who were busy playing the Washington Mall sans Brian Wilson and any remnant of the great band they once were,) Grand Funk Railroad's "We're An American Band," not to be confused with the Yo La Tengo song of the same name, and, closing their encore, a faithful rendition of "Sheena Is A Punk Rocker." I was in good company, and I would like to announce that while i unquestionably dominate Celebrity/People in The Hat (particularly when personages related to the Federation of Hospital and University Employees are allowed in the hat,) i totally suck at Boggle.

Today would have been my dad's father's 93rd birthday (he died in 1988.) Yesterday was my cousin Kai's 3rd birthday. Tomorrow my brother returns from England. And then next sunday, i hit 24, which i'm feeling sort of ambivalent about, though i'm definitely in a better place now than i was a year ago, even with the drama and frustrations of apartment hunting.

Today is the free Laura Cantrell/Steven Malkmus/Yo La Tengo show in Battery Park, which should be a lot of fun. Fingers are crossed for YLT to eschew Summer Sun in favor of I Can Feel The Heart Beating As One, And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out, and earlier stuff.

Further substantiating my conviction that Mean Girls owes an uncomfortable amount of plot and theme to Heathers is the revelation that the director of the former is Mark Waters, whose brother Daniel, in addition to penning such screenplays as Demolition Man, and Batman Returns, wrote Heathers as a sort of high school Full Metal Jacket and claims (probably in jest) that he initially wanted Kubrick to direct the film.

Mean Girls is no Kubrick - though it doesn't attempt to be -- and it too often substitutes a boring, moralizing, heavy-handed preachyness and a fairly racist reliance upon deeply problematic tropes of African barbarism and the sexual appetites of Southeast asian teenagers (and here we get Full Metal Jacket after all) for Heathers' far darker critique of the construction of "teen suicide" and the commodification and exploitation of the adolescent in popular culture and in the filmic genre epitomized by the work of John Hughes.

Plus Lindsay Lohan is no Winona Ryder, and no amount of inexplicable shoplifting is going to change that.

Clancy Eccles

Just found out that Clancy Eccles, socialist Jamaican reggae singer, passed away. Eccles was one of the people who may or may not have invented the word "Reggae."

Thank you Jesse Michaels

Stand by your friends
wrong or right
Can't call that "Justice"
If it's just a stupid excuse to fight.

Single out and attack
ones who got no defense
you call that a new way of thinking
I call it regression to ignorance

[Lyrics from "Take Warning" byJesse Michaels/ Operation Ivy, 1980something]

In my dream last night I ran into Marissa (L.) and Helena. They were with a bunch of women i had never met. Helena was holding a baby which i don't think was hers, but it was mad cute. There was some banter about the OC, and then i noticed that Marissa's hair was died and uncharacteristically straight. No idea what it means.

All Your Little Wishes Have Run Dry

Note to self. Making plans to apartment-hunt on July 4th weekend was a dumb idea.

And so i remain in my parents' apartment, possibly for another month, even if looking tuesday actually works out.

Argh.

Nine Seats For Mortal (wo)Men Bound To Lie

CNN: "Battle For The High Court Begins"
ROTK trailer: "The Battle For Middle Earth Has Begun"

another thing for Peter Jackson to sue about, i guess.

The New York Times reports that, as it scurries to push forward DR-CAFTA, the attempt to solve the conundrum of the FTAA's collapse through smaller, regional agreements which could very quickly create a dynamic which pits Latin American governments against each other in a race to the bottom for US/transnational capital, the Bush administration has spent a year trying to block the release of a report it funded which is critical of the labor standards in the countries covered under this agreement

The Labor Rights Fund concluded in nearly 400 pages that while there were some adequate labor laws in Central America, there were systematic barriers to enforcing those laws. Recordkeeping is shoddy, giving workers little chance to make claims against employers, the reports said, and sanctions for violations are weak.

The fund also found problems ranging from discrimination against labor organizers to inadequate measures against child labor. El Salvador, for instance, the study found that it was not uncommon for foreign companies to close shop and leave without paying workers. The study also noted a failure to maintain safety, citing two accidents at a textile plant in 2002 in which 560 workers were overcome by fumes in chlorine spills. The ensuing investigations were shoddy, the study found.

Though the Labor Rights Fund has been critical of labor standards in developing countries, the Labor Department nonetheless chose it to conduct the studies. The contract was worth $937,000. "We transparently and in good faith put in a proposal," said Bama Athreya, deputy director of the Labor Rights Fund.

But after the reports were submitted in early 2004, the Labor Department held them in secrecy, preventing their release to Congress and forbidding the fund to publish them, Mr. Levin, the Michigan representative, said.

iFetishized Commodity Shuffle fun

Architecture In Helsinki - "Imaginary Ordinary"
Nirvana - "Come As You Are"
Nirvana - "Stay Away"
Bob Dylan - "As I Went Out One Morning"
The Clash - "Hateful"
Liars - "Loose Nuts on the Veladrome"
Ghostface Killah - "Beat The Clock"
Sleater-Kinney - "The Day I Went Away"
Jeff Buckley - "Corpus Christi Carol (For Roy)"
Sonic Youth - "The Sprawl"

(Come on down to the store. you can buy some more more more more.)

I finally watched Kinsey, which was pretty good, even if i think it may adhere a bit too faithfully to the "great man changes history" school of historiography. The "sexual revolution" did not begin with Kinsey and encapsulated the actions of uncounted thousands of people he never met and who likely never read his books. I could go on and get foucauldian, but that really isn't what i want to talk about right now. Anyw, so I switch it off, and then ABC News is talkin' about how the republicans 2want a replacement for O'Connor before October and will use the "nuclear option" to expedite this if they so desire. First reaction was "so much for Kinsey. Then moved over to the computer and read latest accounts of flailing imperial and became very uncomfortable at the thought of ever bringing kids into the world. The changed channel to live performances of Bob Marley and The Wailers in full fetishized glory, and just sat and listened to "Them Belly Full."

Them belly full but we hungry.
A hungry mob is a angry mob.