caveat lecture

Oh god, the honda commercial with "Huddle Formation" is on again. As i still love that song on a visceral level, its use to sell automobiles disturbs and saddens me. Though even with the many problems I have with him these days, I think Common's Gap commerical is even more disgusting, with its way-too-late commodification off the 60s now turnign towards the native tongues for its feelgood (by the numbers) harmless consumerist vacuous and crass commodification of hip hop. This is the guy who did "I Used To Love HER," for christsakes, and while that song's gendered metaphor was profoundly fucked up (Hip hop as woman, selling out/gangsta as drunken whoring,) it was pretty far from a gap commercial. Is this another case of what, following the late, great Joe Strummer, we might term "He Who Fucks Nuns Will Later Join The Church" syndrome?

I did a guest lecture yesterday for a class on social movements taught by a fellow GSOC member at Queens College. It was the first time I've ever done something like that - a)publicly lectured on labor for like an hour, b)publicly lectured on anything, c)tried to link my scholarly work and my activist commitments in front of people who aren't in GSOC or weren't part of the UOC. It was kind of trippy. I wasn't as well prepared as I should have been and if I'd had a better sense of what I was doing I think I could have changed what I said around to make it much more useful to the class. As it was I gave way too much historical/theoretical overview for what was supposed to be a personal narrative of my involvement with the labor movement, didn't talk enough about my experiences with the labor movement, and didn't link my experiences with broader concerns, in part because i hadn't mapped this out enough in advance, and in part because I was a little nervous. But i did get to talk a little about the hospital-university city, the medical debt fight, Local 34, 14 strikes in 65 years, GSOC, Hotel Workers Rising, PATCO, The Houston Janitors (whose victory calls to mind Vincent Sirabella's claim, oft quoted on this blog, that "They can beat us in the streets of New Haven, but they'll never beat us at the bargaining table,") the 1941 Disney Cartoonists strike, the Detroit Newspaper Strike of 1995-1997, the Taft hartley Act, the 1946-47 general strikes in oakland and Pittsburgh, and the NLRB. It was a lot of fun, and hopefully I'll do this better next time someone wants me to do something like this.

the group of kids i was sitting next to on the Q17 back up Kissena to Main street (Where you get the 7 Train, which winds past Shea stadium and then across Northwestern Queens back to midtown manhattan,) were having an absurd conversation. I don't remember what it was about. Queens College has a pretty campus. I like Flushing, but I wouldn't want to live there, primarily because it's called "Flushing."