Baby Panda is clearly watching John Sexton and feels that NYU ought to immediately negotiate a contract with GSOC in good faith.

The Truth Is A Virus

The GSOC Rally/CD was great. I signed a card, got a pin, and joined the union. NYU American Studies profs were there en masse. I met and re-met some grad students in my department. I saw Morgan Fairchild speak in solidarity with us. There was a little drama around Sweeney, who wasn't particularly cogent or inspiring, which i will not get into here. ( He seemed very tired.) I saw Phoebe, Evan, Robin and a whole lot of GESO and other federation folks. Marching with Andrea and Phoebe and Bob and Brenda and Ann Marie and Jay and busloads of other folks i spent most of the last half-decade organizing with in one way or another seems like a pretty solid way to start grad school.

The title of this post references Pump Up The Volume, which isn't a very good movie, but i like the viral metaphor in terms of me spreading what i learned in New Haven on to another campus and exchanging experiences and information via organizing. Which i am going to have to figure out how to do again soon. Organizing, i mean. This scares but also excites me. Kind of wish i'd gotten arrested. Mad props to those who did. I'm sure there will be more opportunities for me, on one campus or another.

What the fuck is happening in New Haven, by the way?

This story is terribly written. Doesn't the times style manual say anything about overly snarky overuse of the passive voice?

through the looking glass

My department has union folks come to TA trainings to talk about the contract fight and advertises this on departmental emails. I don't get the sense that this has ever been permissible at Yale, even in a department like AMST, where, while there's some strong faculty support for the federation in general and even GESO in particular, there are also a number of senior faculty who've espoused decidedly anti-union views and interacted with their students thusly, something that remains true even with Brodhead's departure and Butler's promotion. The difference in faculty support between NYU and Yale, even in a department like mine, is pretty staggering. I want to figure out whether this is because NYU hasn't yet run the kind of anti-union campaigns Yale has, or because of some more "essential" difference in the way academics here understand what they (we? holy &^#$) do.

A quick and frightening link to a story about incidents of racism at UVa, all in the first week of school.

some block quotes while I try to figure out a longer post

Jonathan Tasini has some questions about the head of the AFMA he wants the press to answer:

To explain his relationship with a management firm, McCormick
Advisory Group, headquartered in Laconia, NH, and with a law firm, Seham Seham
Meltz & Peterson, based in Westchester County, NY, which has a long history
of representing management in the airline industry.
to explain how The
McCormick Group also founded the Professional Flight Attendants Association
(PPFA), which successfully raided an AFL-CIO union at Northwest Airlines.
To
disclose what the Seham law firm gets from AMFA and whether he knows that the
Seham firm has long represented airline managements in opposing workers and
their unions

While Phoebe excerpts in detail the fantastic Chronicle of Higher Education piece on poor (ridiculously wealthy) embattled and controversial Yale investment czar David Swensen. I'll quote from the article itself rather than Phoebe's post. (Subscription required.)

Mr. Swensen is embedded on the New Haven campus. He wants you to know that
he and the endowment, "a symbol of Yale's wealth and power," are a part of
the university.

Just don't get too close.

Only a handful of Yale's most powerful leaders are allowed to peer inside
the endowment's machinery. For everyone else, investment of the
university's billions is a black-box affair. It is a strategy, critics
say, that is long on secretive investments in nontraditional assets like hedge
funds, venture-capital funds, and other private-equity funds, but that sells
short external oversight. The names of the funds that Yale invests in? Their
strategies for making money? Their investment returns? Privileged
information.
***
But critics of the Yale endowment's management have peered under the veil
of secrecy just enough to reveal what they say are questionable investments that
have harmed people and the environment. The activists -- students, alumni,
members of Yale's unions -- acknowledge Mr. Swensen's enrichment of the
endowment, which in the 2004-5 academic year pumped $565-million into the
$290.2-million collected in donations. They want assurances, nonetheless, that
the opaque endowment will shun shady deals, no matter how much money is at
stake. Mr. Swensen refuses to meet with them.

At issue, say disclosure advocates, is Yale's soul, the essence of which is
articulated in the university's motto and emblazoned on its seal: Lux etVeritas.
Light and truth. "I'm suspicious of the notion that you have to be
secretive in order to get things done," says Roxana N. Tynan, a 1988 graduate
and a member of Yale Alumni for Social Justice.

"Yale is a private institution, but it plays a public role," continues
Ms.Tynan, who works for the L.A. Alliance for a New Economy, a nonprofit group
that got Los Angeles to adopt a living-wage law in 1997. "At a minimum, it
needs to be transparent to members of its own community. Money isn't
blind. Whether we like it or not, [it can be] used to support or it can be
used to oppose a problem regime or immoral practices. It doesn't wash that
it's OK that the only thing that matters is the financial return to the
institution. "

For an endowment manager, however, light and truth can be dark and
dangerous. "Disclosure is just adverse to the investment process,"
says Mr.Swensen.

oh god

The byline, not the article. The Yale Media Conspiracy continues.

I guess this is what Jon Butler was talking about. Looks like the women are just SOL. Now, why would anyone want a union?

Working on the hyphen post now. Went to weird diner on Montague with Jacob and Erin, who it was really good to see.

"What's pornography like in China? (I of course think cross-culturally.)"
-My mom.

No strike fund? No strike vote. No requirement on the company to rehire strikers after the strike. Horrible union leadership of a union built on raids and covert racism.

Bad situation, all around.

Ipod seems to be working again, which is good. Sometimes it's a good change of pace to be able to listen to music while walking. Today I listened to the recent Andrew Bird cd, Andrew Bird & The Mysterious Production of Eggs. I wasn't sure what to expect, but i'd read good things, and yeah, it's a pretty good album. The lyrics are kind of oblique, but interesting, and the musicianship is very good.

I also listened to Twin Cinemas for like the fifteenth time, and the cd continues to grow on me, not quite vying with The Woods for my favorite CD of the year to date, but in the running with Come On Feel The Illinoise for a close second. (If you're wondering, my favorite CD of 2004 was probably The Go! Team's Thunder, Lightning, Strike, which is finally getting a domestic release soon, albeit with some alterations due to fucked up US copyright laws. In the meantime you can check out their website here.)

Alright, that's all the music blogging i've got in me tonight.

The faculty at Youngstown state have reached an agreement to end their strike but have pledged to continue to respect the picket lines of other striking workers.

I disagree with this - there is still auto industry in the United States, and while the threat of offshoring and capital movement will continue to loom large, i don't see any possibility of "political change" that can in any way promote organizing efforts happening until 1)we are organized enough to force such change and 2)Are actively working with unions across the globe to organize workers across borders. Sitting around and waiting for the Obama administration to fix everything, or continuing to peg all workers' futures in dumping as much money as possible into Democratic Party campaign coffers isn't going to create a labor movement capable of challlenging transnational, imperial capitalism. And if workers can't find a way to do that, well, as a very stupid person once sang, "we're all pretty fucked."

hint: The stupid person was me!

en mi primera noche de la universidad, mi compañero de cuarto urinó en mi piso

Five years ago this week I started college - it was on a friday, i think. That's how it works, right? Yale people? Anyway, i got back from my FOOT trip, met my parents, found my room, and met my roommate, a hulking Lacrosse player from a toney Fairfield County shore town with four names followed by a roman numeral who litened to Leo Kottke, had insisted on bringing a Television, on which he would later enjoy watching George W. Bush's campaign speeches, immediately referred to a student Computing Assistant as "that little Chinese girl," and before long was on the phone talking to friends from home about "the Spics' house." I was perturbed, to say the least, going so far as to nervously joke to the mother of a friend from high school that my roomate, with his teutonic-sounding four names, might be a nazi. Crass, i know, but forgive my youthful ignorance - or chalk it up to paralyzing fear of Yale's shaded avenues and acid-worn gothic fortresses - fear that I was subjecting myself to indoctrination into his world, or that subconsciously i had always been a part of it, that beneath my veneer of black-clad NYC Jewish anarchist lurked a yuppie asshole waiting to be born.

That night i walked around the Yale campus. I went to Ivy Noodle for the first time ever. I met some people. I found a friend from high school. I was visibly shaken by the amount of wealth and indifference people were displaying on the trek out to the BD house or whatever frat party people went to on the night first years show up. Still wrestling with my self-righteous antipathy towards controlled subtances and my idealized view of myself, my family (or at least my mom's side,) my high school, etc., i went to neither, and wound up back in my fifth floor Lanman-Wright double exhausted and in desperate need of a lot of sleep.

At approximately four in the morning, the door opened. I was still mostly asleep, but i realized there were two people standing in the doorway. Totally out of it, I mumbled something like "is that my roomate," at which point the older of the two silhouetted figures was clearly laughing at me, thinking I was drunk or something. This I resented greatly due to my aforementioned antipathy to controlled substances, but I was beginning to wake up, and I understood that yes, the bizarre and improbable scene at my doorstep did indeed involve "my roomate," and the other individual was either a security guard or police officer. (I would subsequently learn that he was a police officer, though whether he was a Yale cop or a member of the New Haven PD, I don't know.

The police officer left, and i watched the roomate's silhouette move across the dark room and fall onto his bed, sitting up to remove his shoes. Bewildered, still exhausted, and frustrated both at being woken up by this and very daunted at the prospect at having to live with him for the next year, I asked him if he was okay.

"I'm fine," he replied. "It's just the Negro police."

I was completely awake now, and completely silent for a second.

"What?" I asked loudly.

"Oh, don't get me wrong," he replied, "I love Negroes."

I wasn't particularly reassured. Actually, i was freaking out. But i was tired enough, and, i guess, white enough, that all I could really do was go back to sleep, assuring myself that I would have to find some way to deal with this once I'd slept and, perhaps, when my roomate was sober, or other options could become available.

Two hours later I was awoken to a loud, strange, trickling sound. I looked around and saw Johnny Four-names, his back to me, standing in the middle of our large dorm room, his legs slightly spread. It didn't take me very long to figure out that he was peeing all over the floor, probably still drunk to find his way down the long hallway to the bathroom.

After that, i could no longer sleep. I checked my email. I checked it again. I browsed amazon.com. I read the Times. I showered. I went back to my dorm room. Eventually he woke up, got out of bed, and after apparently slipping in his urine and rolling around on the floor in his urine for a few seconds, he got up and walked to the bathroom. When he came back, i confronted him about the pee. He denied everything. He hadn't peed on the floor, he "was just really sweaty last night."

"No," i told him, "I saw you pee." After a few minutes of this, he apparently took my word for it. He told me he had some Lysol and a rag. Convincing him to mop took several more tries over the course of a few hours. I never talked to him about the racist things he'd said about the police officer who escorted him home the night before. I didn't know what to say, and I was scared of having to live with him and i didn't really want to broach the subject. In retrospect, i wish i had done so as doing otherwise was ultimately possible only by clinging very tightly to a white privilege which allowed me, however uncomfortable, to not feel constantly physically threatened while in his presence.

That morning, i saw my friend from high school and her mother again. "How's your nazi roomate?" her mother asked. So i told her. And i told most of the folks i met, because I really didn't know what else to do, and didn't see any particular reason not to talk about it.

And so that was how i entered the world of higher education, in a puddle of urine, intimately close to a barely restrained racist drunkard, who, the next night, slashed open his thigh while attempting to drunkenly scale the fence around Old Campus, having become so inebriated as to have forgotten how to use his ID card to open the gate.

In some ways, it was a good thing it happened so early - not because of the two months spent barely speaking to eachother culminating in the second time he peed on the floor (and on his printer) and his eventual forced migration to a room with an in-suite toilet on the other side of campus and all the discomfort and drama surrounding his departure ( i spent most of the mights immediately preceeding it on an ex's futon, to the consternation of her suitemates. No, whatever use i draw from my membership in the fraternity/sorority of psychotic, racist, and/or incontinent roomate survivors (three of my four roomates the next year had previoulsy lived with floor-peers) i link, somewhat tongue in cheek, to its usefulness as both a metaphor and an illustrative incident in understanding the contentious relationships and politics of globalized universities and deindustrialized cities. As traumatic as all this was to deal with, I guess i should be thankful that whatever rosy-colored glasses I might have otherwise developed got ripped off my face pretty quickly.

That's pretty much the pee story. Thank you for reading.

ready or not

New Fugees single actually happening. Wow.

much obliged.

thanks for the links to The Bellman, Cat Dynamics, and Pinko Feminist Hellcat.

coda

Also, what do we make of the crack Smith's character makes regarding the alien's "dreadlocks" after he punches it in the face? (I forgot about this, just like i forgot about every line in the movie except when Judd Hirsch tells the dude "Nobody's perfect" for not being Jewish, but i looked the movie up on imdb.com to make sure i wasn't completely talking out of my butt while writing the last post.)

All my socks have huge holes in them. I'm not sure why this is, but i susoect it may have something to do with the massive holes in the heels of my sneakers, which are rapidly disintegrating with each step i take.

alienated

just now finished Against Race, a rather long book with a lot of arguments, several of which are quite brilliant. But on the final page, Gilroy, writing on the eve of the millenium about "planetarization" and the salience of tropes of outer space, motherships, and aliens in twentieth century black popular culture, virtually lauds the films Independence Day and Men In Black, arguing that "

product placement considerations aside, it is impossible to overlook the fact
that this crop of movies expresses real and widespread hunger for a world that
is undivided by the petty differences we retain and inflate by calling them
racial. These films seek to celebrate how the desire to retain those
out-moded principles of differentiation recedes when it confronts more
substantive varieties of otherness and forms of life that are truly
other-worldy."(page 356)

This may be a valid reading of both these films, but i'm troubled by the extent to which Will Smith's "adolescent physicality," as Gilroy calls it, occupies the racialized field of visuality which Gilroy spends a great deal of time linking to fascist aesthetics. Specifically, and particularly in Independence Day, Smith's dialogue seems very much inscribed with an essentialized raciologized black(male)ness, here constructed as a blustering but fragile machismo, exacerbated rather than obviated by the threat of the inhuman. Perhaps I'm falling in ot a trap here and employing the concept of race where I should be learning to rely on other analytic frameworks, but I've always found the exaggerated stereotypes upon which all of the film's characters are constructed (see Judd Hirsch's character, for instance, or Goldblum's,) deeply troubling. If someone can make a good case for why i'm wrong, I'll be willing to listen, but the careless racialized stereotyping which frequently structures the dialogue of Smith's character throughout the film makes me very uncomfortable with Gilroy's claim. That said, I haven't seen Independence Day in about 9 years and remember it as being absolutely terrible. So i may have repressed a lot.

EDIT: I'm probably wrong. Also, in unrelated news, the baby panda's eyes are open, and he's adorable.

quick link josh-style

Cary Nelson proposes ten reasons, valid and spurious, why administrators oppose graduate employee unionization.

baseball (ludic interlude)

the mets have taken the first three ga,es of a four game series from the diamondbacks. The last two games were huge blowouts. This one especially so - the final score was 18-4. Jose Reyes homered and David Wright and the rookie call-up Mike Jacobs each homered twice. The diamondbacks had to use six pitchers, five of whom have ERAs over 5.00. Tomorrow is the last game of the series, and Pedro Martinez is pitching for the Mets. Martinez has been great all season but hasn't won a game in hist last 4 or 5 starts, mostly because of bullpen collapses.

hopes and fears

I have no real idea what i want to study in grad school, other than pretty much the same stuff I've been working on since Denning's FORMAC class four years ago with increased emphasis on cultural theory, globalization, maybe some Foucauldianism and its inheritors and critics from postcolonial perspectives. All of which means, well, i have no idea. And don't even ask about research topics or a dissertation. This strikes me as a very dumb way to enter a Ph.D. program. But let it never be said that I ever did anything intelligently. I think the last sixteen months have more than proved that. Although i do like my apartment, dead mice in the cupboard, stray waterbug, and all.

But i thought I'd use this space to recycle an old mainstay of USAY Coordinating Committee meetings, courtesy of the organizer formerly known as "snoopy," back before she had her picture in HEEB right below Rachel Weisz and Jennifer Conelly and Jake Gyllenhaal, and talk about what i'm afraid of going in to this and what i hope to do with it.

First the fears: As I indicated above, I'm afraid that I have no real idea what I'm doing. I'm pretty sure I want to be in graduate school right now because wen i've done other stuff, my inner monologue has frequently told me to get my ass into a PhD program for some inconcievable reason, but I really don't know what to do once i get there. I'm afraid that American Studies might make less sense than a History program or something that lets me indulge more transnational concerns, but i also think that having to acknowledge the problems and significance of theory from and in the metropole is important. I'm afraid that after a year I'll feel like i'm drowning and be so disillusioned with cutthroat academic smarter than thou bs that i'll drop out and then after i drop out want to be back in grad school. I'm afraid that by the time i finish my diss, assuming i do, new York's transformation to militarized/securitized yuppie theme park will be so complete that i won't be able to afford to live here or survive doing so. I'm afraid that grad school is going to be atomizing and lonely. Which i guess is where, if you believe Kathy Newman, the union comes in. But i'm afraid that if the AFL-CIO further collapses, some unions might abandon grad students at private universities until they can get the Brown precedent overthrown through the efforts of a not-yet-existent democratic NLRB appointed by a loned-for democratic administration and sacrifice immediate organizing for "long term" political work. This fear is probably unfounded and based on total ignorance. I'm afraid of starting to organize again and doing house visits and putting myself in a vulnerable position, but i'm also going to do all these things anyway, and not just because none of my friends would ever talk to me again if i didn't. I'm a little bit afraid that people will think i am A)stupid as fuck b) pretentious c)a fascist or d) all of the above.

Hopes: I'm hoping that i find new ways of integrating activism and scholarship, that i build on everything i learned in new haven and in boston and in the schomburg and figure out how to do work that is engaged and exciting and all that good stuff, and that GSOC gets recognized and the NLRB is all like "whoops, our bad" and that contingent academic workers can come together to radically transform the structures and assumptions on which the production of knowledge are ordered and reverse the onslaught of casualization and corporatization, that the futures of both New York City and New York University are substantially different from those imagined by their current rulers. I hope that i figure out how to be an adult at some point of my life. I'll leave it at that. Because it's late. And I may delete this whole thing in the morning.

stand up and be counted

I've enabled word verification on the comments. This will block the spammers who've recently flooded this blog, but i'll still allow people to make anonymous comments, so folks who read will not have to get blogger profiles to comment, which is just silly.

I listened today to the entire two hour realaudio file of July's NYU Town Hall meeting on the administration's "proposal" to not negotiate a new contract with GSOC. A great deal of this sounds familiar (and not just because Sarah Wolf appears towards the end sounding quite like Sarah Wolf.) I'm struck by the strong faculty support the union has. NYU clearly has not (yet) suffered the despicable kinds of divisive intimidation tactics used by Yale to such disastrous effect in the mid-1990s. I feel a little reticient about my relief at the support GSOC does have, like it could all go away if Sexton decides to start threatening unionists with deportation and pressuring the profs to start sabotaging job recommendations, but it's also ultimately extremely reassuring to hear people with whom i will be studying (several of whom I haven't met) speak out to support the union. (It seems like in the years since the 2003 strikes, GESO's support among faculty and undergrads has increased significantly, thanks to the success of the surveys and subsequent platform organizing. I mention their post-grade-strike difficulties to try to get at some of my own fears about grad school and to try to understand what could lead a supposedly progressive intellectual like Ian Shapiro or Sara Suleri Goodyear or Richard Brodhead to act in the way that they all did.)

The point i made about Sexton's frequent invocations of the sanctity of "Student Voice" in an earlier post todaybears repeating and a bit of exposition here. very simply, Student Voice is not ultimatley something that is John Sexton's to foment. Indeed, the racous cries of solidarity captured by the DAT recording strike me as rather potent expressions of a very strong chorus of voices which Sexton and his administration have proven quite determined to ignore. If Sexton is truly concerned with "student voice"[s], he should perhaps start listening to them and responding in good faith rather than with empty promises and near-assurances that he will not be dissuaded from refusing to negotiate. Claims that graduate students will continue to be provided for though they are not being "allowed" to enter the discussion about the future of graduate teaching and education in any meaningful way strike me as insultingly paternalist. So I turn to something Mark Wilson said on March 4th, 2003, at the Med Center strike rally with Andy Stern and Dennis Rivera. At least, i think that was when he said it. It could have been later that week, but anyway, Mark said, "If they won't let us in the picture, we'll take the camera and make our own picture."

The graduate students who spoke were eloquent in articulating the very important point that teaching courses or sections, grading papers and exams, and doing research is very much within the realm of work - time consuming, challenging, and crucially important to the visions of universities as we want them to be.

There's a big rally on the 31st. I'm meeting with faculty the day after to select classes.

Twin Cinemas, the new New Pornographers cd i told you i'd be gushing over today yesterday is indeed gushworthy and grows on me more on more with each listen. Unlike Electric Version, which for me really rested on the stregnth of "July Jones" and the unbelievably wonderful "It's Only Divine Right," Twin Cinemas is thoroughly impressive from start to finish, and Bejar's contributions fit in almost seamlessly with A.C. Newman's compositions. Pitchfork already noted how prominent and kickass the drumming is, but it bears praeteritio here, so i won't get into it any further. Ha, i made a funny. Speaking of which, I -- oh screw it. I was going to correct my earlier mangling of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles theme song lyrics, but there really are many more important things i could be doing right now. Like reading.

John Sexton's statement regarding the Bush NLRB that "even a broken clock is right twice a day" is intentionally deceptive. University presidents weren't handed down this decision by divine fortune. They lobbied for it. They lobbied for an NLRB amenable to throwing out the NYU decision. They wheedled and schmoozed and made deals and alliances. This decision happened in part because, law school recruitment policies aside, these universities - NYU, Columbia, Yale, Penn, Brown have been more than willing participants in the policies of the Bush administration in more ways than this one.

revelations

PG's argument is more subtle than I initially thought. I still have issues with it, and i think while some of his criticisms of Rose are very powerful, their are still ways in which Black Noise remains valuable for me. I'm not sure whether to get into this here or in some seminar paper of the future.

Listened to the first half of the online audio of the NYU town hall meeting. Sexton's claims that he's for student voice are ridiculous. If you want student voice in any meaningful way, then realize that students can decide how we want to speak. We don't need a company union on your terms. Recognize GSOC and start bargaining.

the culture of life at work

Pat Robertson wants Hugo Chavez assassinated.

see, no quota here

flipping through my Fall 2002-Spring 2003 organizing notebook for no good reason, i found two Josh quotes that never went up on the quote page. This was, i think, less because of any alleged but wholly unsubstantiated and indeed inexistent quota against certain individuals whose initials may or may not be the same as his residential college, but rather because, as Josh quotes go, these weren't really that good. Here they are anyway.

"...unless you're young and spritzy like me..." [not sure if this was spritzy, spritely, or what. the ravages of bad handwriting and two and a half years.]

"I did one of those at my zionist socialist youth group camp and they guy didn't catch me." - on trustfalls.

Also, here's Richard Levin, from that Master's Tea in Morse where Frank whatshis face waved his hands in my face to try to get me to shut up:
"John Stepp felt he should dissappear."

Also found ll my notes from the planning meetings for Education In The Streets, including someone's suggestion that we get the Football Team, and, at the next week's full committee meeting, Josh's reportback on a YCC meeting that "It was a really good meeting, especially considering that they are a junta." This never went up on the quotation page because I already had Josh calling the YCC a junta, but I think this quotation was actually much funnier.

blog posts i want to write but won't right now because it's way too late and i am exhausted

1.reflection on the politics of hyphens
2.A cultural history of John Holt's/The Paragon's "The Tide Is High" and subsequent covers by Blondie and others
3.A critique of Paul Gilroy's slam of Tricia Rose's Black Noise in Against Race.

And i'll probably post something tomorrow gushing about the New New Pornographers CD, which will be out by then. Which is exciting.

Six Feet Under is dead

The finale was pretty good, the montage at the end was incredibly stupid. Plus, I don't like the republican.

sufjan stevens

is pretty amazing live. The dual themes of pep rallies and pirates were entertaining. The 9-person band was overwhelming. The hipsters in the crowd making out with each other made me jealous. Against Race is brilliant, infuriating, and at times almost superciliously allusive (and ellusive.) I suspect i'm going to get increasingly pissed off as Gilroy starts talking about Missy, Snoop, and SWV in relation to fascism. I'm going to sleep now.

book reports

Finished Impossible Subjects this morning. It's fantastic, and everybody who reads this blog should read it, because Ngai's brilliant and makes some arguments and points to elements of the history of the construction of illegal immigration of which i was completely unaware. Next, i think i'm going to try to get through Paul Gilroy's Against Race. Incidentally, this is my 800th post on this blog, believe it or not.

I was hoping that the new Blogger for Word feauture would find some way to do footnotes. No such luck. Bleh.

sidebar surprises

I made a "Greatest Hits" section on the sidebar with links to some old entries i'm particularly fond of or feel may explain where i'm coming from to folks who don't know me and/or don't particularly feel like reading 798 posts of, oh, this. I will be adding more soon - conspicuoulsy lacking are my posts from the back and forth on the Lord of The Rings and "the Aryan" and on the Republican Convention and the militarized gentrificatory politics of gunpoint urban rental. This gives me an excuse to go back and read what i've been writing here for the last sixteen months, which is kind of fun, though returning to some of those really hard months will be a bit intense, i'm sure. So keep checking back. In the meantime, i'm taking a cue from ABP

What's In A Name

For folks who are just jumping on now -- or who never had the, uh, misfortune of reading my last last blog, I now present an explanation of why this blog is named the way it's named.

In early February of 2004, Yale University president Richard Levin announced that he would serve on a comission headed by Bob Kerrey, ex-democratinc senator and current neo-liberal president of The New School University. Or The New School: A University, as it is now calling itself. The panel, appointed by the president under pressure from critics of the war and neocolonial occupation of Iraq, was charged with investigating what the deal was with the apparently evanescent Weapons of Mass Destruction. Many of us involved in the movement to transform Yale from imperial capitalist to socially just and responsible site of learning and teaching responded to the news that Levin would be serving on a panel designed to exculpate George W. Bush DC '68 with a great deal of skepticism. When challenged, Levin informed us that we lacked open minds. But we should have seen it coming - and indeed some of us had. We knew that for years the Yale administrators had referred to workers attempting to form unions as "terrorists," sometimes bluntly and sometimes in more graceful phrasing but to the same end. We were not suprised when the president made a recess appointment to the National Labor Relations Board who proved the decisive vote in overturning the "NYU decision" precedent, though we were surprised by the total reversal of that decision's findings, that graduate student teachers and researchers performed work central to the economic and ideological functions of the university.

In a university so implicated in the machinery of capital and imperial war, and in which labor organizing had been repeatedly branded as terrorist, the workers themselves, it seemed to me, were weapons of class instruction (playing on the dual meanings of class as a site of teaching and as a form of categorization and heirarchy.) I then proceeded to milk this for way more than it was worth. Case in point. Now you know, and knowing is half the battle.

All this machinery making al the music

sitting in St. Mark's Place Chipotle, McDonalds-owned faux cali-mex chain staffed by low paid latina/os, and "Ghost Town" comes on in the place's preprogrammed stereo and all i can think, looking out on the street full of rich white yuppie hipsters and atavistic tatoo parlors and the skeletal remains of Coney Island High, is yes, Terry Hall, this town is becoming like a Ghost Town, thanks in part to the very establishment which is now playing your song on its preprogrammed playlist to appeal to affluent tourist/NYU/ex-white-thirdwave-"rudeboy" hipster set.

Now the place where i'm blogging this is playing John Sebastian's theme from Welcome Back Kotter.

this doesn't suck at all.

This sucks for the concertgoers, I'm sure. But this clearly sucks so much more.

anticolonialism, gender, and the popular front

I finished Race Against Empire approximately three minutes ago. It's a well-researched and powerful book and i really should have read it three and change years ago while i wasn't going to my computer science class and was dreading having to sit through Paul Fry's execrably arrogant and hypocritical Lit Theory lectures (I'm almost proud of the C+ i got in that class.) Enough about me.

Eschen traces the trajectories of a transnational afrodiasporic laborist anticolonialism during the late 1930s and early-mid 1940s, hegemonic not only among left scholars and activists like Paul Robeson and Alphaeus Hunton and (until his ant-communist turn in 1950) George Padmore, but also among NAACP liberals like Walter White and Channing Tobias. That this anticolonialism is contemporary with the cultural formations Michael Denning describes in The Cultural Front seems not particularly coincidental, and Eschen makes this point clearly. One of the most interesting arguments Eschen makes is that while this movement is hegemonic among activists in the African diaspora, it briefly disrupts the gendering of Africa as "motherland/fatherland" and instead pushes folks to look critically at Africa as a site of exploitation of black workers by colonial powers and American corporations, in the process opening a space for women to become leaders in the anticolonial movement, but this space and this disruption are effectively closed by the repressive and racist surveillance politics of Cold War Manichaeism, which attemps to silence and obscure the voices of the loudest proponents of this Internationalism, like Hunton, Robeson, and W.E.B. Du Bois, all of whom have their passports removed by the United States government to proevent them from traveling to Africa and elsewhere in the "third world" and disrupting the U.S. state project of minimizing the visibility of U.S. racism towards African Americans to Africans, Latin Americans, and Asians in the "third world." While this state project is ultimately a failure, the repression visited against activists attempting to foster this anticolonialist internationalism shatters it, although Eschen argues in her conclusion that while the next generation - the black U.S. New Left - was forced to reinvent the whell to some extent, they, from Malcom X to the Black Panthers to Dr. King, also to some extent interacted with this tradition's footprints, even if figures like Hunton, and the importance of Robeson, were tragically forgotten.

So, what kinds of connections are we building?

Bleh, it's too early in the morning for me to be comprehensible. Next up on the reading list is Mae Ngai's Impossible Subjects, which Katie recommended, so i'm sure it's pretty good.

Youngstown State workers are on strike

and the faculty may soon join them

"I love being a turtle!"

Ok, i promise that's the last reference to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on this blog for a while. But I'm assuming that if I didn't already lose you all with panda obsessions and anti-Diplo invectives, a couple stray references to a childhood fad aren't going to lower my readership any more than my typically mediocre posting quality will.

Today i saw not one, not two, but four turtles in prospect park, all sunning themselves on rocks. Litle kids walking by were pretty excited. It was really cute.

Also I learned that Anonymous Baby Panda (ABP) has even more company - a baby California sea lion born July 6th at the Bronx Zoo. I'm not as obsessive about this largely because I saw a crapload of baby sea lions attempting to sun themselves on the docks at Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco last September when i was out there for boycott-related program activities and the Bronx Zoo sea lion exhibit pales in comparison. ABP is mad cute though.

more book stuff

Von Eschen's statement that "..Garvey made the American Negro conscious of his African origins and created for the first time a feeling of international solidarity between Africans and peoples of African descent... Garvey transformed African Americans from a national minority to a global majority" seems somewhat at odds with Lipsitz's argument, heavily reliant upon the work of Robert Farris Thompson (the somewhat nutty master of Yale's Timothy Dwight College) that African Americans were in fact practicing small acts - such as reinterpreting and rearticulating customs and practices of the various West African cultures from which their ancestors had originated and had brought with them to the Western Hemisphere, in order to perform exactlly this kind of "transformation" from national minority to global majority. Garvey may have been among the first to articulate these connections within the contexts of electoral politics and transcontinental commerce, and Von Eschen clearly wants to argue that this intellectual, diplomatic connectedness really owes a great deal to Garvey and his followers, which is certainly true. And Garvey's also important in terms of diasporic popular cultures, particularly ska, rocksteady, reggae, dub, etc., as any Don Drummond or Burning Spear song title will attest. But I wonder if the argument can be made that Garvey himself, and his politics become possible largely because of the presence of these less vocal but deeply meaningful traditions that enslaved Africans brought with them and their enslaved and free descendents have preserved for hundreds of years.

(I have some problems with some things that Thompson said in the class I took with him. I will save these for a later post, though, because I want to do some reading and a whole lot of sleeping.)

all the words past the margin

I finished The Possessive Investment in Whiteness yesterday. There are moments when i think Lipsitz is incredibly strong. The chapter on the failures of the civil rights project is fantastic, as is the chapter on Blues and 'the African' in African American culture, (and i'm not just daying that because he brings up the Eric Clapton-Enoch Powell affair and I hate Eric Clapton.) As in Dangerous Crossroads, I think Lipsitz is very convincing when he writes about race, music, and the politics of expropriation. Also very useful is Lipsitz' emphasis on identities as mutable and historically contingent formations and on the struggles through which identities are formed and contested as key elements of social movements "invesiting in" and urging divestment from whiteness. There are moments when I think Lipsitz's clear, accessible writing style is emotionally evocative and viscerally powerful. There are also moments where I think he makes introducing further complexity into some of the dynamics he tackles difficult and I find the absence of complexity in some of his arguments nagging and frustrating. Lipsitz's chapter on the OJ Simpson Trial is very even-handed and also very incisive and when i walked into Barnes and Noble the other day and saw Mark Fuhrman's latest hard-cover best seller on display, i was at first bemused, and then wanted to throw up. Can someone please explain to me how a racist cop from a brutal, racist police department is a best selling non-fiction author?

Anway, I've now started Penny Von Eschen's Race Against Empire, which is brilliant so far and deals with a lot of the themes that popped up here and there when I was doing research for H.V.C. this summer and looking through archived letters from the Pan African Federation to St. Clair Drake or between George Padmore and Ras Makonnen or at the columns Padmore wrote for the Chicago Defender. I was actually supposed to read Von Eschen's book over three years ago for Seth Fein's lecture class, but never got around to doing so on account of the overwhelming depression i was in the middle of that semester which kept me near-paralyzed in my room, occasionally coming out to go to SLAC meetings, wander up and down broadway glouring at yuppies-in-formation, do the work for "Strikes In Twentieth Century History and Culture," teach UMOJA, and flail through the half-semester of my failed attempt at learning Yiddish prior to dropping it. I wish i'd read it then, I'm glad I'm doing so now.

"Lisa, We Have Elected Officials So We Don't HAVE To Think All The Time."

Fox released the sixth season of The Simpsons on DVD yesterday, which, among other great episodes, like "Lemon of Troy," "Two Dozen and One Greyhounds," ("be my vest,") "Homer The Great," and "Lisa's Wedding," to name a few, contains the Simpsons' take on the Rush Limbaugh, Contract On America era, "Sideshow Bob Roberts," which is an extended riff on All The President's / Few Good Men (Smithers as "Deep Throat"...) and depicts the republicans as an elite fascist conspiracy/cult who speak satanic languages and whose membership includes dracula and responds approvingly to the misunderstood suggestion that they nominate a water cooler for mayor. The episode brilliantly takes on the racist Willie Horton ads (in 1995/6, i guess Dukakis was still vaguely contemporary) and ranks just below "Last Exit To Springfield" (the episode where the plant goes on strike) and the episode where Burns flees to Cuba with the trillion dollar bill on my list of favorite "political" Simpsons episodes. I was going to write something longer and more above a 5th grade reading level, but instead i will shut up and you can go rent the DVD and watch the episode.

And then there's "Lisa's Rival," in which Homer, guarding his massive pile of fructose, opines "In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women" and confesses "I can't live the buttoned-down life like you! I want it all! The terrifying lows! The dizzying highs! The creamy middles!" I'd say something about this, but you should go read some Sidney Mintz instead.

Turtle Power

I walked the legnth of Prospect Park today on my way up to Manhattan, because I'd never really done it before, and because it's shady and cool in there. Prospect Park is awesome. It's big, it's beautiful, and when i was walking by this little pond that was bright green from all the beautiful algae, i saw, sitting on a rock in the middle of the pond, a little trutle. Then another turtle appeared on the surface of the water, trying to climb up on the rock. It couldn't and dissappeared underneath the surface again, only to re-emerge and attempt to scale the rock unsuccesfully a few more times before I left to continue towards Grand Army Plaza.

Much later, after a detour through Boerum and Cobble Hills and some ice cream in Brooklyn Heights, as I walked down Cadman Plaza towards Tillary Street and the Brooklyn Bridge, I started thinking about how cute the turtles were. Then i started thinking about the old Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles theme song and trying to remember all the words. "Heroes in a halfshell, and they're green," "Donatello is smart, Michaelangelo's a party machine (cowabunga)" and whatnot. That was pretty much all i could remember, which is sad, because I definitely watched that show every saturday morning for years. It's a pretty great song.

Update: remembered some more while doing the dishes. "When the evil Shredder attacks,/those turtle boys don't give him no slack."

make headlines, believe them, come back

Julie linked me. And she put Sleater-Kinney in her myspace profile. Woohoo!

the pandacam is back

...so there goes my week

i'm mostly kidding. But look at that nose. Also, the baby is currently hiccuping. Which is amazing.

"That was nifty"

Just finished rewatching Buffy The Vampire Slayer's 7th, and final, season. Season 7 gets disparaged a lot by internet-happy buffy fans with too much time on their hands (check out imdb if you doubt me,) but I think it's actually one of the strongest arcs. Well, hell, all the seasons are great. But season 7 is powerful for far more reasons than the fact that there is a Kim Deal/Breeders cameo, which should be good enough for anyone. (Kim Deal, people. Kim Dee-uhl. (How does one represent a schwa on an alphanumeric laptop keyboard?)) I love season 7 because it's about organizing. It's about collectivity and taking on powerful, sometimes intangible but ultimately very palpable networks of oppression and violence and relying on each other and sacrificing and putting your self and your body on the line and winning. It makes me cry. And the ending is like Lord of The Rings but instead of militarism, there's militance (and militants) and it's about democracy (demoncracy?) and growing up and getting hurt and moving on.

I think the pandacam is down.

Season 4 also gets a lot of shit. (Except for Hush, Joss Wedon's meditation on the failures and terrors of speech, which pretty much everyone including me admits is absolutely brilliant, and Restless, the collective dream episode which is way better than the earlier stab at the same idea from the first or second season with the chocolate bars and the clown etc.) I think season 4's important too, with its soulsucking freshman roomates and cavemen drunk college kids and military industrial university complexes and with its queering of half the show's tropes and its attempts, however deeply flawed, to show people having sex and not turning evil because of it. I also think that Season 3 may have been the strongest single arc in the entire show, ending the high school years with a bang, foreshadowing many of the themes and stories the show would tackle over the next four years, and also having some powerful things to say about youth organizing and high school and the state and Season 4 had to be anticlimactic because of this. It also took a little while for folks to get used to Cordelia's outsourcing to Angel and replacement with Anya, which ultimately worked rather brilliantly.

BBC World Today just had a pretty good piece on the CBGBs rent stuff which talked about the gentrification of downtown. They called it "market-led," which isn't entirely accurate, or rather obscures the ways in which the "market" relied on police tanks and neoliberal structural adjustments and the Giulianist attacks on communities of color, queer and transgender youth of color, homeless folks, street vendors, and nonviolent drug offenders. Nice to hear the clip of Debbie Harry singing an acoustic version of "Call Me" at one of the CB's benefits, though. If Hilly Kristal moves to Vegas, he shoudn't bother ever sitting foot in NYC again. No offense to Vegas or the folks who work there or Saqib. But there's no way that would not be disgusting. Tramps, Coney Island High, The Wetlands, The Spiral... The list of places i used to hang out and watch music (including, in the case of CBGB, my friends' bands and my brother's bands) which were early casualties of gentrification and Giuliani is a pretty long and frustratingly complete (except for Knitting Factory and Irving Plaza.) And yet Roseland, of course, is infuriatingly still terrorizing concertgoers with its awful acoustics, high door prices, and murderously high prices for teenyweeny bottles of water.

Instead of meeting with Cindy Sheehan, he flees the ranch in a helicopter to attend a little league game. Nice.

what do you call it when someone jams a culture jam?

blast from the mid 1990s

The Suicide Machines were a Detroit Ska-Punk band who emerged into my consciousness sometime around 1996 and rode the "alterna-rock" radio format's flirtation with bands like No Doubt, Sublime, Goldfinger, and Reel Big Fish to no small success. I haven't listened to their debut, Destruction By Definition, in approximately nine years, but from what I remember, the songs were about adolescent and post-industrial feelings of marginalization and enclosure, not explicitly "political," but explicitly rebellious, in however an easily comodifiable way.

I gotta say, I'm somewhat surprised that they still exist, given the high level of attrition suffered by other 90s ska bands, particularly from the boom and bust ska-punk and ska-core subgenres. I'm even more suprised to hear them singing songs about capitalism and monopolies and "war profiteering," much less "The Red Flag" and "the coming revolution." That the ska-punk has shifted towards hardcore is less surprising. I think i kind of like them better this way. ("Rebellion Is On The Clearance Rack" is downright funny.) The Bush years seem to be making some punk, well, punker. Or, i guess i should say, polemicopunker (And some punk "liberal," but now is not a good time to get me started on that punkvoter crap.) As the Slackers' International War Criminal EP attests, this politicization has not been limited to the ska-punk side of the old Moon wall. (There were three albums in between the first and the new one, starting with Battle Hymns, which I never bought cause I was very angry about the state of ska and disillusioned with even the "political" ska-punk bands, like Against All Authority. But I may have been wrong. it was a long time ago. And I was pretty young.)

So What Do The Penguins Get?

The guy who made March of The Penguins is making bank. The film has been widely successful. The documentary filmaker deserves the accolades and everything, no question, but, to paraphrase Return of The Jedi (I'd tell you the character's name, but that would brand me a huge, huge dork,) many Penguins died to bring us this movie. So i hope the filmaker is giving something back to the boydz, whether that's donating to some environmental group that's trying to svae what's left of the Ozone layer, or whatever.

It is a pretty amazing film, and you should go see it if you haven't already.

yo pandacam

What's up with zooming in on the mother panda's hind quarters while she defecates? It's a little bit weird.

principled nitpicking (zachedcheck.org)

A while back, commenter Julio claimed that "...this [workers' putative rejection of UNITE's camapign to organize American Apparel] was teh [sic] first industrial protest against organized labour in US history, outside of agriculture. They just didn't want it." I've seen this same claim voiced on other blogs and on comments posted to several newspaper and magazine articles about American Apparel. As folks who read this blog know, I'm skeptical about the claim that what occurred at American Apparel was, in fact, a "protest against organized labor" and not, at least in part, a campaign of veiled and pernicious scare tactics by American Apparel management.

But right now, i'm less interested in debating this than looking at the claim, which seems like it must be part of "AA's" PR campaign, that had this been a "protest" against organized labor, it would have been the first such "outside of agriculture" in US history. This is a ridiculous assertion. There have, of course, been numerous protests against organize labor by workers [we'll assume this is what Julio meant] in various industries. I call readers' attention to the battles throughout the (long) twentieth century to desegregate unions, their leadership, and, particularly in the building trades and in manufacturing, their hiring halls. I also could call readers' attention to the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, who, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, mounted autonomous workers movements inside Michigan auto-industry plants against what they understood as the racist collusion of the UAW leadership with the giants of automobile manufacturing, using the phrase "finally got the news about how our dues are being used" as a rallying cry. In 1968, when the New York City teachers' union became embroiled with Black and Puerto-Rican parents in a struggle for community control over schooling, the overwhelmingly white teachers struck. Many teachers, including my mother, crossed picket lines because they felt that the union's position was a racist and reactionary one. And this doesn't even consider the long history of interunion struggles - like the battle between UCAPAWA/FTA-CIO and the Teamsters over Chicana and Jewish women cannery and agricultural workers in 1940s California or the Teamsters' battles with the UFW decades later.

Does AMerican Apparel think it's the first corporation to defeat a union drive? Do they want us to look at every defeated union drive as "an industrial protest against organized labor," or will they ever provide evidence they didn't threaten to close the factory or hold captive audience "rallies," thus attempting to bolster their claims of exceptional circumstances? Regardless, whether this line is part of American Apparel's PR campaign or it is simply a mistaken claim that has been circulated from person to person on internet comment threads, there are absolutely no circumstances under which this claim could be true, regarldess of what may or may not have actually occurred at American Apparel.

strangest footnote ever?

"I must add here out of deference to Bob Marley that, while he shot the sheriff, he did not shoot the deputy."
-George Lipsitz on the ballad of Gregorio Cortez

Finished the most recent Social Text issue on Surveillance, which was pretty good. Started Lipsitz's The Possessive Investment In Whiteness, one of those books I've been meaning to read for about four years. The first 37 pages have been cogent and fierce. The chapter on the failures of civil rights legislation is particularly strong stuff. At times the book feels like it could have been written by CCNE, which is always a good thing. Apologies for the less than perspicacious comments. It's very hot here and i have no a/c. Anyway, Josh in particular, but really anyone who reads this thing, if I haven't scared you all away with the whole He-Man as confused metaphor for union busting university administration, if you haven't already, you need to read the Lipsitz book. I think you will all find it very useful.

A woman smiled at me on the street in Park Slope as I was walking up to Manhattan and all i could do was bashfully look away. I'm a 12 year old in a 24 year old's body. Mei Xiang (mommy panda) just did the thing where she pushed baby panda onto her forepaws with her nose and then picks him up and cradles him while he nurses. If you haven't been pandawatching, you clearly need to get your shit together. Now she's nuzzling his head. Awwww.

Being more or less on my own for the first time since Boston, really, is proving a bit intense. Being an adult again forces me to sit down and painstakingly go through all the myriad ways i've fucked my life up over the past sixteen months or so, and then try to figure out how to move forward, how to feel like I'm part of a community and engaged in work I want to be doing. I am finding this daunting - because I'm shy, because I'm scared of fucking up even more than I feel like I already have, and because sometimes movin' on is just plain scary and difficult.

third time's the -- well,, the third time.

Here's comic 3. I guess this is a little bit of a rip off of what David Rees did with Voltron. But apparently He-Man was the reason I learned to read.

my horrible webcomic about graduate employee unionization

here, let me know what you think below.

my cookie cutter webcomic. (This actually happened to me today)

read it here

I know, i know, I'm a Pandavangelist.

too lazy for even blockquotes...

...but this Nation piece by Naomi Klein is well worth taking a look at.

good news?

you call the US colonization of Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines (and the subsequent war against pro-independence Filippinos in which the U.S. killed some 300,000 people) "good?"

If you want to talk about good things that happened in August, I got one for you. August 26, 2003. 55 Whitney Ave, New Haven. 8 Retirees. One investment office. (Five "terrorist" sandwiches, but that's unimportant.) Now that was amazing...

phone conversation

"Wait, so now you want to be a panda, you don't want to be a monkey anymore? So if you were a Panda, what kind of Panda would you be. Ha ha ha." - Frances Susan Schwartz.

pandas, plus three counts of attempted vehicular zachicide

baby panda is so fucking cute. Right now, i'm watching him on the pandacam (which is admittedly very panoptical and fucked up, but... pandas... cute... and i'm reduced to inarticulability.) He's repeatedly trying to curl himself into a ball, he's waving his tiny feet around in circles, and putting his little forepaws on top of his head. He's so adorable. Now he's trying to scratch himself. And every now and then he makes little noises, I think.

In the last two days three motorists have apparently attempted to hit me with their vehicles while i was lawfully crossing an intersection with the light and the pedestrian right of way. Yesterday it was these two guys in an SUV. I remarked to them that I had the right of way, which was dumb of me, and they shouted obscenities and threats and sped away making obscene gestures. so i called my mom. Today at the same intersection (5th Ave and 9th street in park slope) as I was aga-- excuse me, baby panda is now grasping a bamboo stalk in both paws and seems to be chewing on it -- ahem, again walking to Manhattan, a grey sedan nearly plowed into me. This time i didn't say or do anything.

Then, once i made it to Manhattan and was walkign up Broadway from the city Hall area into SoHo (eww) towards the east village, a large RV driven by a hasidic man in his late twenties or thirties with like "Lubavitch Mobile" or something like that written on the front and detailed with lots of stars of David and the phrase "The Moshiach is Coming Now!" (which confuses me because i thought they thought that the Moshiach was that Rabbi who passed away a few years ago) --Mommy Panda was eating, while Baby panda was doing his ball impression, now they are showing her defecating, which seems very invasive. Now she's eating some more. -- anyway, Moshiachmobile turned a corner as I and some goyishe tourists were crossing the street and nearly ran us over. Am i being too aggressive in my street-crossing? Am i zoning out because i've been walking way too much in 94 degree weather? Or do they just hate me for my freedoms?

Back to baby panda writihing around on ground and munching on bamboo. Awwww.

the contradictory logic of late capitalism

Legendary punk club CBGBs can't be evicted.

This because of its crucial role in gentrifying the neighborhood and, apparently, helping to create a Downtown without Coney Island High, Tramps, Wetlands, or The Bottom Line.

What strange logic.

such magnanimous finance capitalists

And the state only had to throw a couple hundred million dollars of taxpayer money at them!

yo jules

i changed your link. You happy now?

more panda cuteness

digital amnesia

I lost a long post about wandering something like, and possibly in excess of 13 miles through brooklyn and lower manhattan today. It was a good post. I don't feel like rehashing it. Suffice to say that i walked down 8th ave into boro bay ridge and turned around when at 86thish and fort hamilton parkway, walking up fort hamilton parkway through boro park and kensington past greenwood cemetery all the way to prospect park, and then up prospect park drive southwest past windsor terrace, and then up whatever ave into park slope, walked up 8th ave to 9th street, across 9th street to 5th, nearly run over by Husky White Males in truck at 9th street and 5th ave, walked to st marks and 2nd ave in manhattan, ran into A. Had dinner with A. Walked to west 4th and took D to 36th, walked home. It was better than that though. And there was this woman on the subway i developed an ephemeral instantaneous crush on. Got home, read email from program director of Am Std answering all my questions about registration et caetera. Looked at other email addresses, and i think one of the other first years went to my high school and graduated a year ahead of me and worked with me for a summer. Small academe.

success and housekeeping

I figured out what I needed to figure out about the whole "grad school starting" thing. This makes me relieved. I'm still fairly clueless about what i'm doing there, but I think i'm somewhat less clueless than I was in April, which has to be a good thing.

Comments are welcome on this blog. Please comment frequently. Especially if you disagree with me. What aren't welcome are spam comments, which seem to be flooding Blogger's comment client of late. I'm not interested in online poker and i don't really want to enlarge my penis, so if i get comments urging my readers to do any of these things, i'm clicking on the basura.

Speaking of housekeeping, Blogger's main page lists a "Blogger Business Summit," to be held next week in San Francisco, in which attendees will learn how to integrate blogging techniques and technologies into their businesses. The privatization of the internet commons aside, my real problem with this summit is where it's being held -- The Sheraton Palace Hotel, which Unite-Here Local 2 members were locked out for two months last autumn, and which they have been urging clients to boycott since, like, January. Why are these people disregarding the boycott? Why would they want to put their seminar participants through possible picket lines? Doesn't make sense. They need to move.

also:

"This is the new Iraq," said Mr. Tamimi, a secular engineer with no party affiliation. "They use force to achieve their goal."

Via Gawker.

The sad thing is, the person who wrote this was probably a hipster. Or maybe they are German, and were just innocently employing the definite article, a la Sideshow Bob. At any rate, Williamsurg's gentrifier community seems not to have heeded the advice.

I just watched the two most recent six feet under episodes, which were both surprisingly good for thsi pretty crappy season, though they definitely proved my point about having to kill off major characters. And what the hell is Claire doing with Republican lawyer guy? That's just wrong. I especially liked the scene when Ruth tells Hiram off and then envisions herself blowing away all her former lovers with a walking stick/shotgun, whcih was simultaneously wonderfully empowering and also deeply sad.

I think the series finale is on Sunday. I had more i was going to say about it, but it's 9:20 am, i got woken up by some minivan outside my window at 6:30 and just kept honking repeatedly for literally about fifteen minutes until whoever they were trying to pick up didn't show and they drove away, and i kind of want a flavor-ice. (I bought 100 of them for five bucks. So much better than an iPod.)

I once had a pod, or should i say, it once had me.

My iPod is on its last legs - actually, it barely works, randomly skiping tracks, with horrible sound quality that gurgles and fizzes where it really shouldn't. Which makes me glad i brought my CDs to the new place so i can listen to music here. I feel ambivalent about the death of the iPod. On the one hand, it was really exoensive and i don't have a lot of money. On the other hand, i knew this was going to happen because the pieces of shit only last like a year anyway and i bought mine used 12 months ago, and i wasn't really feeling the sound quality or the sanitized and unemotional interface you get with music when selecting it from a long file list rather than finding an actual cd or record and physically doing something to it to make it make noise. This is probably a bit reactionary of me. At any rate, in the interest of not spending any more money than i need to right now, i'm going to delay any new digital music device purchasing for a while, with the possible exception of a cheap ass discman or something so i can maybe listen to music while i'm out walkin'.

Speaking of music, the M.I.A. show at Central Park Summerstage yesterday afternoon was a lot of fun, although my reservations about the cultural politics of Diplo's expropriations of Baile Funk remain in effect. For the most part, the crowd, which included about half of all the people I ever went to high school with, was really cool and peaceful and energetic and hot and excited/ing, the exception being some snooty hipster woman with her entourage who kept cutting in front of us to bring her posse up closer to the center of the stage or something. Didn't ruin it for me though. MIA's performance was fun, playful, jouissant, whatever. Mr. Vegas's "Oh Johnny" crotchgrab was a bit much. I thought DJ Rehka was great.

Before the show I hung out with my parents, my grandparents, my great aunt and uncle, and my cousin -- their son Ben, and his partner and two kids, ages 1.75 and 3.75, who are totally adorable. Today we bought a cheap and serviceable kitchen table and i walked to Manhattan again and then took the train back. I'm a little bored and i am hoping i figure the grad school stuff out real soon.

dead mouse in the cupboard. fuck.

Also, i have neither pipe nor ivory nor do i smoke anything and thus will be unable to put anything in my ivory pipe to smoke.

some clarifications on the American Apparel controversy

I probably shouldn't have called Dov Charney a schmuck. I have never met Dov Charney. I tend to assume that people who have allegedly sexually harassed employees are schmucks. Take from that what you will.

In response to the several people who have commented on this blog regarding Charney and the Unite-HERE drive at American Apparel, I offer the following clarifications and responses:

Folks who claim that the Yaeger piece was pulled because of innacuracies cite no printed correction acknowledging this, and i don't believe one exists. The Yaeger piece is simply no longer accessible via the Village Voice website. Unless someone can produce a written statement by the Village Voice explaining why this web page is no longer accessible, any assumptions to such an explanation strike me as premature and misleading.

Attempts by commenters to dismiss the sexual harassment complaints strike me as contrived, as extremely sketchy, as insufficient, and cast doubt on the veracity of other claims they are making. Whether or not any of this goes to trial, these claims, like all claims of sexual harassment at work, need to be taken seriously. Otherwise you end up with Clarence Thomas. I find Dov Charney's statement in the infamous Jane article, quoted by a Washington Square News columnist, that "women initiate most domestic violence," deeply troubling.

Commenters seem torn on when AA began providing health care for workers. One claims that health care was implemented sometime after the union drive and launches into a spirited attack on a journalist who critiques the company for relying on the state to provide health care to its workers, another claims this never happened, and that management always made availabe health care for an $8/wk worker contribution. Which is it?

Commenters claim that UNITE HERE duped workers into believing Charney didn't want the union but offer no proof of this. I remain skeptical.

Commenter "Julio" argues that workers could have simply gone up the block to the LA Times to complain. I wonder how long they could have kept their jobs if they had done so openly or had been discovered doing so clandestinely. I'm not buying Julio's argument.

Commenters claim that behindthelabel.org, which is a project of UNITE-HERE, cannot be unbiased in its attacks on the company, but i'm wondering why. Why is Dov Charney so opposed to his workers having a collective voice? What kind of equilibrim has he created in which workers can't speak unless through channels initiated and controlled by management? Just who printed those armbands anyway? How does an ostensibly "pro-labor" or "pro-worker" company justify captive audience anti-union rallies and threats of plant closure?

High wages, benefits, and even paid time off are no substitute for a voice on the job. If American Apparel's corporate brand managers want to keep representing their product as "socially responsible," they have some questions they need to answer. And it isn't me they have to answer to.

NYU update

Here's a link to NYU's memo announcing their decision to the university community. There's a lot here, but paticularly galling for me is the news that the administration's "final offer" not only abolished the grievance procedure, but, had the union been desparate enough to accept it, would have implemented a so-called "open shop" in the graduate school, making union membership "voluntary" for all teaching assistants.

No Contract... (You know the rest.)

With the "discussion period" concluded, NYU has notified the Graduate Student Organizing Committee-UAW that it will not negotiate a new contract with them, but will instead hide behind its Brown decision rights to allow a recognized bargaining unit to instantly lose its bargaining unit status by recess-appointee judicial fiat. NYU is claiming that the union's concerns over who can and cannot TA courses "imperiled the academic rights of the university and its faculty." This seems highly implausible to me. What seems far more likely to "imperil" the "academic rights" of university faculty and students is the adamant support by administrators at NYU, Yale, Penn, and Columbia, to name a few schools of further casualized teaching arrangements and the continuing erosion of job security and the right to a voice on the job. Union busting, as the aftermath of the 1996 GESO grade strike demonstrated, is the single most destructive force against "collegial relationships" and "academic rights," and claims otherwise are immediately suspect.

Prior to annoucing that it would not negotiate, NYU was kind enough to offer the union a contract in which the independent grievance procedure (i.e., the recourse to the American Arbitration Agency) was completely removed. That's a bad faith move if ever there was one. "Accept our joke of a contract which leaves you pretty much crippled, or we walk." I'm insulted, and i'm not even enrolled yet. A grievance procedure in which the union can appeal only to management is not a grievance procedure.

NYU has promised to implement $1,000/year tuition increases over the next three years, to continue to pay health insurance, and to create some sort of GSAesque company union structure to replace the union it's trying to crush.

Should be an interesting few years.

shuffle

The Ramones - "Judy is a Punk" - little known fact, but actually anachronistically written about jailed political prisoner Judith Miller.
Pinback - "Sender." Recently heard these guys on a commercial that was either for Game Boy Advance or some hyperfructoid fruit drink. I can't remember which.
The Exploding Hearts - "Throwaway Style."
Augustus Pablo - "Brace's Tower Dub No 2" - Augustus Pablo was the best Melodica player EVER.
Nirvana - "Pennyroyal Tea" appropriate what with the new wave of Kurt fetishism brought about by the new Gus Van Sant film.
Boards of Canada- "Rue The Whirl"
The Clash - "The Sound of Sinners"
The Beatles - "Love You To"
Mos Def - "Champion Requiem"
Slint - "Ron"

Harvard is having trouble finding someone to replace its money manager. This article cites David Swensen's >$1,000,000 salary last year as a modest alternative to the previous Harvard guy's $7,200,000. Swensen is the highest paid official at Yale University. Alumni at Harvard are demanding that the university subcontract out some positions to external brokerages. The article discusses the problems inherent in the imperial university's need to continually increase profi---err, it's endowment and thus attract top tier capitalists like Swensen and Harvard's Jack Meyer while subsequently maintaining an image as a "non-profit" liberal arts institution dedicated to the "public good."

Oh, well, clearly, that makes it all ok then, doesn't it?

discriminate detention

Chisun Lee's story in the Village Voice about the hundreds of black men in Oneonta who were the subjects of a police roundup in 1993 is quite terrifying. There's a story here about racial profiling and the genesis of the age of infinite detention in the micropolitics of policing and the construction of the racialized figure of the criminal, but there's also a story about blackness and higher education - a narrative i heard folks reference a lot back in New Haven -- a narrative of fellow students refusing to open a gate for you when you lost your ID card, of having the cops called on you when you were trying to use the gym or study in the library, of being restrained by multiple officers at a student party and nearly arrested for being while black. 13 years after the roundups in Oneonta, university campuses remain violently racialized in ways which belie the myth or perhaps simply demonstrate the utter failure of the university's embrace of enlightenment universalist rationality. That there have been no consequences for the Oneonta PD is unnaceptable. That the racial logic behind their actions remains very much in place is horriffic.

i would walk five hundred blocks

I've spent most of the last week doing three things - furnishing my apartment, exploring the neighborhood, and going on really, really long walks which tend to wind up in the east village in a roundabout way. On Monday, i walked up to Pacific st. and back and then took the R train to court street and walked to the east village.

On tuesday I walked into Brooklyn heights and over the bridge and down Chambers all the way past West street to North End avenue, where i hung out with my grandparents in their new place for about an hour before their dinner guests showed up and my grandmother, who i've always called "Babu" because i couldn't pronounce "Bubby," which, for all the goyim, is Yiddish for grandmother, when i was a baby, told me about when she worked a s a gym teacher at Dalton, an uber-elite and exclusive upper east side prep school, before becoming pregnant with my mother. My grandmother was at one point a truck driver for my Anarchist great grandfather Zacharias, after whom i'm named. I knew she wound up teaching dance at NYU, but i had no idea she'd ever taught gym, much less at a place like Dalton, where the kids, her students would make fun of her for being from the midwest and from a not very wealthy family. Both my mom''s parents are originally from Illinois. Their parents were immigrants from the Ukraine and Belarus. My grandmother grew up in a small town, my grandfather and his brothers on the South and West sides of Chicago. They met at a Young Communist League meeting at UIUC. My grandfather was there on a football scholarship. My grandfather ("Zayde" is yiddish for grandfather) is a diehard White Sox fan. I mentioned to him that the Whitesox are in first place and have the best record in the AL, something i know because of my post-Boston rekindled interest in MLB. Then my grandfather told me about when he was a kid, living in post "Black-Sox" scandal Chicago, (when seven players on the 1919 white sox conspired to throw the World Series) and so few people went to white sox games that the stadium would open its gates after the second inning and kids from the neighborhood could come in for free and sit anywhere they wanted and watch the games. Seeing my grandparents was immensely fun. I left them, walked up to Washington Square park, and then around the NYU campus for a while before hopping the D back to Sunset Park.

Yesterday I decided to walk to Williamsburg via Park Slope, Fort Greene, and Clinton Hill, mostly to see if i could. It got a little hairy around the Williamsburg Street BQE onramp, but it gave me a much better sense of the geography of Western Brooklyn. I've spent very little time in Williamsburg. The neighborhood took off as the "next big thing" when i was in high school and spending most of my time either in the Bronx or on the LES, which was not yet nearly as gentrified as it is now. Generally, when i have gone there, it's been via the Bedford L-station, which is the hub of all the hipster gentrified over the top williamsburgistry that's forced rent into the stratosphere and led to plans to demolish half the neighborhood and build luxury condos for the post-Yale set -- the ones who actually make money -- to inhabit, and driven the folks who lived in the neighborhood - particularly the latinos - further south or out altogether. I can count the number of times I've been in Williamsburg on one hand, and until yesterday, i'd never approached from the south. Walking up Bedford Ave from Williamsburg Street, through the Hasidic and Latino areas gave me a new perspective, made me cognizant of how disjoining the "break" between Hasid, "Hispano," and Hipster really is. Walking into the Bedford-N. 7th st. Tasti-D-Lite (i needed a hit of something real cold and mushy) after walking the legnth of the neighborhood's volatile cartographic disjunctures was immediately disorienting and uncomfortable. So then i doubled back to S. 5th, walked across the Williamsburg Bridge to Delancey Street, met my dad outside where he works, and had dinner with him.

And today i walked to the east village via the brooklyn bridge again, and my face is all sunbirned, and I feel like tomorrow I should walk east instead of west.

Having my own place again, for the first time (not counting Boston) since the two years I spent on Bishop street is good but odd, as if I have suddenly forgotten how to exist without my parents in the next room all over again. It's been a long year. (Actually 15 mos, but three and a half of those were with the union or in Tucson or in the non-functional mustang of doom.) I feel a lot better about myself now than i did last July, but i think my life still has a ways to go before i'm ok with where and who I am.

My bedroom's pretty much good to go, which is exciting, though we still have to figure out what we're doing about the living room area, which is pretty small. And i still need to figure out what enrolling entails.

The links in this new template sometimes go all invisible. Wave your pointer over them and hopefully they'll correct themselves.

apartment has large crack in walls above one of the doorways and some of the windows, including the three in my bedroom. Huge waterbug flew around the apartment, terrorized my roomate, and then disappeared into cracks above his room about ten minutes ago. aww, fuck.

the cracks aren't visible unless you stand on a ladder and look down. Well, worse comes to worse, we'll get some sealant and box the bug in. I really hope bug is singular.

national zoo panda cam: best thing ever.

"culture vulture shit"

Nick Sylvester already said it, but i'll add my take, in part cause i think he's wrong to back off when he does: Diplo's decision on Favela Strikes Back, his hip-hoppy, sample-heavy carioca funk mix-cd, to omit any information about the brazilian artists and songs over which he splices beats derived from The Smiths' "Bigmouth Strikes Again" and The Eurythmics' "Sweet Dreams," and Dee-Lite's "Groove Is In The Heart," among others, from the liner notes or track information, is more than a bit fucked up.

Granted, this is a mixtape, and the whole point of mixtapes is that you can experiment because you don't have to pay for the samples. And some of this music will be familiar to people who've purchased one of the other baile funk comps or mixes flooding the hipster market eager for new marginalized global south social movements to exoticize. But Diplo isn't giving valuable space to the next hot MC from Queensbridge or Houston, someone every backpacker worth her salt will recognize before they complete the first rhyme of their first verse, he's buying craploads of favela funk cds and sampling at will. Wesley Pentz doesn't speak portuguese. Which would be fine - some of the funk lyrics are flat-out gibberish, nonsensic transliterations of English hip hop phrases by working class Brazilians who speak no English - but there's a coloniality here i nevertheless find deeply troubling. I don't care too much if Morissey and Marr or Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart are getting stiffed on royalties here. But it's safe to say that whoever Diplo's sampling aren't getting any recognition for their work. Instead, Diplo is presenting himself as a postmodern colonial ethnographer, presenting this music as faceless, timeless, absent of context or meaning.

I want to direct folks looking for a more complex encounter with and reading of Baile Funk to turn to George Yudice's recent book The Expediency of Culture, which examines funk and its funkeiros in illuminating detail and scholarly rigor.

the new panda

totally off-topic, but oh my god is this cute

the new danger

Re: the title change. Alright. Education In The Streets was clearly about being an undergraduate at Yale University in the context of the continuing struggles of Yale's workers to reshape the university's divisions of labor and axes of difference, challenge its imperial conquests in New Haven, Colorado, and Indonesia, and constitute and make possible new visions of what education can and should look like in New Haven and around the country. The Problem of Leisure, all 742 posts of it, was supposed to be about culture and globalization, and sometimes it was. Sometimes it wound up mostly being about, well, me having way too much leisure -- little bit ironic, mostly just frustrating. My discomfort with the recent cash-in by the band whose lyrics i took as the blog's title had been impelling me towards a name change for a while, and I hope the new title will lend itself to an exploration not only of being a graduate student in the imperial university, but also into some of the things i wanted to, but didn't always get around to doing here in the past.

Oh, and lest i forget, I would like to thank Richard C. Levin. In the words of Chicago, Rick, "You're The Inspiration."