weekend playlist, fuck punctuation edition:
Guided By Voices: Game of Pricks
Art Blakey & Jazz Messengers: Moanin'
Oliver Nelson: Stolen Moments
The Spinners: I'll be Around
The Wowz: Drivin' To Hawaii
Johnny Cash: One Piece at a Time
The Raincoats: Fairytale In The Supermarket
The Cure or Dinosaur Jr., whichever works: Just Like Heaven/Levin
Go-Betweens: To Reach Me
Dizzy Gilespie - Groovin' High
Wu-Tang - Protect ya neck
Coup - Lazymuthafucka
I spent pretty much the entire weekend finding space, making signs, or being uncomfortably useless in the union office and talking way too much. But enough about that.
I miss Phife Dawg. I just wanted to get that out on the table. "Did not you know that my style's the top dollar/the five foot assassin knockin' fleas off of his collar"
What's with the cover image on Pet Sounds? Dude, you put photos of goats fondling you on the cover of your album and then wonder why Charles Manson is your biggest fan?
This is the third time i've found myself in a position of consciously gearing up for a strike where i've been involved enough in some aspect of the organizing in one way or another to feel very directly affected. This one feels a lot more nebulous than the last two. Partially that's because i'm in the bargaining unit. Partially it's because i've only been here for two months. Partially it's because New York is atomizing and grad school is atomizing and I'm all atomy. And no matter how much organizing i do here I can't really make up for walking out on the boycott campaign last year so i could sit around in my parents' apartment and be depressed for five more months. And this is an indefinite strike. And the folks i relied on to not go all crazy during the summer of 2003 are all hundreds or thousands of miles away. And so is Rev. Scott and it really isn't the same when I'm the one saying "Mountain, Move out of My Way." That said, we can win this, because there's a strong core of GSOC folks who are dedicated and intense enough to make sure that what needs to get done gets done. There's a lot that needs to get done, but, as i've said before on this blog, the support we're recieving from faculty is like nothing i've ever seen before. The undergrads have been great too, although that i have seen before, because, well, that was me. But I never saw this in any Yale paper when i was in New Haven.
Support is awesome. I find the level of support at NYU staggering. But support is not, is never enough. I think the question we need to ask, and it's a question folks here are already asking, is: how do we build a broader and stronger academic labor movement here, together with the adjuncts, the under grads, the tenured faculty, the clerical workers, the custodial workers, and everyone else on this campus and in this city? How do we place our struggle in Greenwich Village in global context? How can we start talking about casualization, about the transformations in the post-Bayh-Dole university, about the work that our work does? This is a question we're going to have to ask ourselves during and after the strike, no matter the outcome.
When we went out on strike in April and it was very, very scary in moments leading up to it as those of us with daily teaching assignments sort of gulped down just how challenging even a week would be. It was also clear that for all the support in the world, and we certainly had that, support is not enough. It was moving to have the European Parliament and some guy fortunately named Thomas Mann abstractly backing us, but ultimately it was irrelevant because it was my body I had to put on that picket line in the morning and my colleagues to face the whole week and make my case to. Forgive the swimming analogy, but it was familiar terrain, the team and family that you have all through training is there shouting for you, but really, you are utterly alone in your lane. And yet what is stronger than support and goodwill is the long history of struggle that precedes you, we at Yale were ever so fortunate for all the veterans of battles past who were hard steel in the face of all that; in March 2003 I looked to the men and women of Local 35 whose picket signs bore 7 "Again!" stickers and acknowledged the incredible lineage of which I would then begin to become a part. That lineage begins anew at NYU, to a certain degree, but you will, and we will, all feel incredibly stronger at the end of tomorrow than we do at the beginning.
ReplyDeleteI will see you in the morning, decked out in my STACHKA shirt and all!
I felt strong today. And it was pretty awesome to see the Yale crew march down Wash Square east, STACHKA shirts and all, and bring some New Haven love to the picket line. Just when i thought i was going to make it through an entire strike without "hey hey hey, right now," i was reminded why i love that ridiculous chant. i'll be posting more on this soon, like tomorrow soon, but I wanted to post a response to your comment, insufficient though it may be.
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