Phenix City?

When i was a teenager, impelled by the highwater mark of the third wave ska revival in the mid 1990s to rediscover (a problematic term) the sounds of Jamaica's first pop music, one of my favorite such "first wave" (an anachronism, obvsioulsy) tunes was The Skatalites' "Phenix City." I always thought the song was a reference to Phoenix, Arizona, a city with which i have a slightly troubled past which is obliquely referenced way back here. But if i'd been from Georgia or Alabama instead of Pennsylvania and NYC, or if i'd ever been stationed at Fort Benning. perhaps i would have known that the song, a Roland(o) Alphonso instrumental whose only lyrics are the repetition of the title after each refrain of the main melodic figure, actually references Phenix City, Alabama, a notorious den of iniquity just across the river from the aforementioned fort, which General Patton once threatened to raze with tanks. I'm not familiar enough with Alphonso's life to know if he ever went there - though i did get to see him play four times before he died. But that the Skatalites would name a tune after the Sin City of the southeast rather than a not-yet of of a not yet booming not yet sunbelt makes things way more interesting.

Rewatched season four of the wire. Perhaps the best single season of episodic television ever. Incredibly moving and powerful, and deeply keen. Plus, Donut is the best source of cheap jokes and sight gags since Ziggy's duck.

All the world that's manned by idle drones

This morning, listening to the Almanac Singers (or possibly The Weavers') recording of Ralph Chaplin's 1915 syndicalist anthem Solidarity Forever, i noticed that like most recent versions (since the CIO era) of the song, Seeger et al omit two of Chaplin's original six verses:

Is there aught we hold in common with the greedy parasite,
Who would lash us into serfdom and would crush us with his might?
Is there anything left to us but to organize and fight?
For the union makes us strong.

and

All the world that's owned by idle drones is ours and ours alone.
We have laid the wide foundations; built it skyward stone by stone.
It is ours, not to slave in, but to master and to own.
While the union makes us strong.

I'd noticed this before, but never really thought about why its these two verses that get cut. I don't think they're aesthetically superior to the ones that stay in - the incredible line about standing "outcast and starving midst the wonders we have made ," nor do these verses, intriguingly, speak of the dependence of capital on both "brain and muscle," as does another verse which remains in the Almanac Singers' recording. Still these two redacted passages are certainly no less radical or expressly syndicalist than the song's final verse

In our hands is placed a power greater than their hoarded gold,
Greater than the might of armies, magnified a thousand-fold.
We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old
For the union makes us strong.

So why leave them out?


I'm on a serious Woody Guthrie kick.

Expect a longer, thought piece on academic labor sometime soon. Have good goyishe holidays.

All Your Emails Are Belong To Us

The NLRB strikes again:

The National Labor Relations Board has ruled that employers have the right to prohibit workers from using the company’s e-mail system to send out union-related messages, a decision that could hamper communications between labor unions and their membership.

In a 3-to-2 ruling on Friday, the labor board held that it was legal for employers to bar union-related e-mail so long as employers had a policy barring employees from sending e-mail for “non-job-related solicitations” for any outside organization.

Thank god we have democrats in congress now. Oh, wait.

Menahan Street Band, 2006. (Bunch of people from Brooklyn retro soul bands like Dap Kings, El Michels Affair, Budos Band.) "Make The Road By Walking." Named after the community organization? Or the Paolo Freire/ Myles Horton book? Who knows.


Jay Z. 2007. Produced by Sean Puffy Combs.


It's pretty interesting that Puffy's mining the Brooklyn retro-soul folks for beats. And they're both great tracks. El Michels Affair put put a faux-isntrumental version of Wu-Tang's "C.R.E.A.M." They've also backed Wu-Tang live.

Also, because i'm still in writing withdrawal after having finished my field exam on thursday, I give you part 2 of adventures in "serious" hair metal:



and finally, because this block is actually supposed to be about, like, labor, and casualization, voila.

I have 8 hours to write 2 sections!

fuck!

bad bob dylan covers

Blackamore's Night: "The Times They Are a Changing".

The guitarist from deep purple or whatever takes a song about revolution and turns it into renaissance fair schlock. Although the guitar is nice, the song loses all its meaning.

Me First and The Gimme gimmes, "Blowin in the wind."

Crappy novelty punk, crappy cover.

u2, "Maggie's Farm."

I appreciate the sentiment, but The Specials did the whole "Thatcher as Maggie" thing long before Bono, and i think the song loses a lot of its harshness here. Plus, i hate u2.

Ok, enough with the bad.

This is much more interesting


While this is totally punk rock. Singing "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Caroll on live network TV..."


If you want to hear some good dylan covers, check out Steven Malkmus's versions of "Ballad of a thin man" and "Maggie's Farm," Cat Power's take on "Stuck Outside of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again," and Yo La Tengo's deeply Yo La Tengoish "4th Time Around" from the I'm not there soundtrack.

Also when i was 11 i thought this was brilliant.

Hmm.

Wait... Are we pretending that NYU values labor rights now?

Putting affordable public education on ICE...

So, the cat (not Spooky) is out of the bag, and Sexton's self-important, self-congratulatory ICE "idea" is really just, after all is said and done, self serving.

One of Sexton's main points is that funding should be spread less thinly and given mostly to private universities, with a caveat that they must partner with other institutions, like public colleges and K-12 schools, to use it.

He used the analogy of science grants, where funding would be given to a "principal investigator" - in this case, the private university - who would be required to work alongside a "secondary investigator," a public university.

"If NYU were going to get a grant, it'd be the principal investigator," Sexton said. "It might get 60 percent or 70 percent of the grant, but 30 or 40 percent would have to be with a partner that was in the public sector - so City University [of New York] or [State University of New York] Stony Brook."

You read that correctly. the state should funnel massive amounts of public money to private, union busting, real estate speculating, second tier institutions, which we should then trust to dispense for the public good because NYU has such a great track record on such matters.

Oh wait. No they don't.

But last year, WSN spoke with adjunct professors who criticized NYU for overinvesting in high-profile, "celebrity" faculty instead of the rest of its faculty.

The adjuncts complained that higher-profile faculty worked fewer hours, had longer sabbaticals and are often busier doing research than teaching classes, leaving most of the grunt work to graduate students and adjuncts.

Sexton called the argument a "false dichotomy built on a false premise." He said NYU does not engage in free agency, nor does it pay premiums or set markets to attract faculty.

Ha. It'd be too gauche to name names here, but this is one of the more ridiculous Sexton claims the WSN has ever been dumb enough to print.

George H.W. Bush might have called all of this voodoo academics, but he would have been racist to do so. It's neoliberalism, pure and simple. Slash public education, give the money to undeservedly elite private universities, and let the wealth trickle down!

Oh, and it's totally connected to the university's global geography of expansion and real estate speculation!

"We'd rather have you say, 'Wow, this is one of the ICE capitals of the world - I'm looking out at these places, I don't feel like moving to the two in China, I'm not ready to move to Abu Dhabi, I don't want to move to Paris. I want to stay in the United States, so it's a choice between New York and a couple other places and this ICE stuff is good," he said.

Sweet!

Also...

I'm interested to hear what folks think about Cam'ron's new mixtape track "Just Us," which , obviously, (and awesomely) samples the piano riff from the intro of "Don't Stop Believing." You can download it here, and The Village Voice's Tom Breihan calls it his best in years.

Alright. Back to the grind, streetlight people.

gone writing.

I'm off working on my feidl exam, so this blog is going to go on hiatus, Or, if i indulge in procrastination, which is pretty much a given, it'll be sporadic at best. I'll post if i see something worth posting about. But i may pop up every now and then anyway to share music i would be listening to if i weren't reading or furiously writing. In that vein i give you two tracks from youtube from artists you've probably heard me rant about before. The first, the honey cone, were one of the best bands signed to Holland/Dozier/Holland's Hot Wax and Invictus labels. "Innocent 'Til Proven Guilty" got sampled recently by Kanye West on Common's "Testify," but I like the original song more than I like that particular moment in Common-Kanye collaboration.
The second track i'll leave you with today is a video from a french TV show of Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings performing "Hod Do I Let A Good Man Down," which generally vies with "How Long Do I Have to Wait for Your Love" for my favorite song off Naturally. I have reservations about this band. I've written about this before here. Briefly, i'm extremely uncomfortable with the ways in which a hipster "revival" of sixties and seventies funk and soul fetishizes authenticity and a supposedly unmediated musical neo-luddism. I'm leery of the racial politics of some of Jones's international fandom - the comments on Youtube that try to read her as a mute reincarnation of Marva Whitney or Aretha, or worse as a museum artifact demonstrating the "natural" musicality of black womanhood. I wonder if the retro chic of the band's self-marketing and self-framing erases some of the ways in which the frames the band uses were problematized by the very figures it seeks to conjure. Which is not to say that there's an erasure of politics going on here - the radical, fierce reworking of "This land is your land," on Naturally and several of the songs on the new record attest to the particular ways in which this project is evoking the political. (On NPR's Fresh Air this week Gabriel Roth explains that "When the other foot drops, Uncle," with its refrain of "You better pack up and run," is about Bush and Cheney.) A cynic might argue that this occurs in ways which don't disrupt or problematize the troubling politics of the band's self-representation or consumption. I will not make that argument here. Anyway, the songwriting's often very sharp and the band is fantastic. But i would like to see more of a dialogue on the blogosphere and among critics (and perhaps it happened five years ago before Dap-dipping and i just missed it because i was too busy storming Woodbridge) about these concerns, not only with regard to the Dap-Kings, but concerning "retro-soul" more broadly, (which means you, Amy Winehouse.) Anyway, here.

omg electoral politics

Frank Rich:

Even Tom Tancredo, the most virulent immigration demagogue of the G.O.P. presidential field, has spoken warmly of Mr. Obama.

Well, let's think about this a little bit. Some of Obama's immigration stances are progressive - or, at least, "liberal," but others are indefensible and right up Tancredo's alley, most notably and egregiously Obama's vote to support the wall along the Mexico-U.S. border, which forces migrants further out into the desert and will only further increase the sharp spikes in migrant deaths we've seen in the last half decade, as well as cause significant environmental problems.

quickly

As the NYU student senate, spurred on by the Take Back NYU Coalition/Students Creating Radical Change, demands disclosure of the university's budget, Sexton gets a big pay raise.

And an update on the anthropology and secrecy controversy.

NYT Roundup

Carson Daly's a scab, rich Princetonites value the lives of their dogs than those of their service workers, and labor turmoil on Broadway may be just beginning.

And, (for my mom, who secretly reads this blog,) this is an interesting article on anthropologists and the military, in which one academic suggests that a slippery slope was created by the AAA's decision to allow secret research by folks working for proprietary companies - the outsourcing of the university - and the academicization fo the corporation feeding into the forms of information monopoly and clandestinity which have been a hallmark of the "global war on terror." Interesting, isn't it?

Oh, and that WGA Strike? Far from over.

The continued stand-off pushed Hollywood toward a decision point in the next week or so, as writers will have to decide whether to dig in for a long strike, or return to work without a contract, perhaps to resume their walk-out next June when members of the Screen Actors Guild might join them.

At the same time, companies will rapidly see the rest of the current television season crumble, unless they make another move to meet the writers’ demands.

A joint strike by the WGA and SAG would be a very interesting tactic.

Back to the reading.

Edit: Wow.

Carrie Brownstein (yeah, that Carrie Brownstein) interviews one of the striking Colbert Report writers today on her blog Monitor Mix.

I went to the WGAE rally at Washington Square park Tuesday after teaching. It was MCed by Aasif Mandvi from the Daily Show and the bald guy from Sex and the City and featured speeches by Danny Glover, Tim Robbins, Gilbert Godfried, Colin Quinn (ugh), and, uh, John Edwards, who was pretty good, although Anthony Edwards was on stage later and the whole thing felt kind of surreal. I've never felt like a starfucker for going to a union rally before, but at one point i was standing about ten feet away from Tina Fey, and Edie Falco and Joe Pantoliano were on stage, and Gilbert Godfried was making jokes like "there are more Jews here than in Schindler's List." By far the best speaker, i think, was Ed Ott, the head of the NYC CLC, who called attention to the other strikes taking place now - the stagehands but also the Aramark food service workers of Local 100 in the financial district. Mike Fishman from 32BJ was also pretty good. As was Danny Glover, wearing his Unite-HERE T-shirt, presumably from when he got arrested in Toronto.

I'm uneasy with the way that some folks involved with the strike are joking about outsourcing - i.e., they'll give all our jobs to the chinese ha ha ha. It smacks of racism and ignores very real issues involved in capital flight and global rearrangements of the international division of labor. Maandvi's joke, the gist of which was that he'd benefit either way (victory/contract or loss/all the work goes to india) was absurd enough to be mildly amsuing, and in some ways parodies what less careful observers have been saying about the indispensability of the creative labor force, Richard Florida style, but i think in general this is the kind of discourse - much like the lawyers claim in court that all our charges should be dropped because we were "outstanding citizens (i.e., privileged white folks, mostly) that makes forging broader solidarities even harder.

UAW wins Foxwoods vote.

And decisively, at that

But the Courant suggests that management may refuse to bargain.

Although winning on Saturday, dealers remain far from a collective bargaining agreement. Leaders of the Mashantucket Pequot tribe, which owns and operates Foxwoods, could refuse to bargain with the UAW and push the issue into federal court.

The tribe throughout the process leading up to Saturday's vote has fought the vote administered by the National Labor Relations Board, saying the federal agency does not have jurisdiction over the casino on its reservation. Instead, tribal leaders have said workers should organize under recently passed tribal laws concerning unions.

Foxwoods officials declined to comment early Sunday morning on their next step. But a statement released by the casino indicates management is likely to continue its fight against the UAW on jurisdictional grounds.

"We are disappointed with the preliminary tally, however, these results will not be official until all legal issues, including jurisdiction, are resolved," said John O'Brien, Foxwoods' president in a statement.

The NLRB conducted the vote on Saturday from 8 a.m. to 11 p.m. in a ballroom at the casino. Federal officials then counted the ballots as casino management, union officials and dealers looked on.

And in another article...

Foxwoods management has fostered a feeling of unease about the union through radio and newspaper advertisements, handouts to employees, and posters at employee bus stops. A poster behind the hotel worker warned "With the UAW, the threat of a strike will always be with us," and cited instances in which past UAW strikes in Connecticut had allegedly led to violence such as rock throwing.

Card dealers know that even an overwhelming vote in favor of unionization will not immediately bring new bargaining power. The casino, which unsuccessfully sought to avoid an election on the grounds that the labor law of the United States does not apply on Indian land, could challenge the outcome.

"I think they're going to fight it," a card dealer named Judith said shortly after voting.

TBD

The Hartford Courant thinks that the UAW may win the Foxwoods dealers' vote...

If they do, and let's hope the Courant is right, it would be a huge victory for the labor movement. But how big a victory? Has the UAW developed a way to systematically organize tribal casinos, or were Foxwoods workers so pissed off already - after ten years of organizing drives and a wildcat or two - as to warrant hot shop status? Can this work elsewhere?

How many times in the history of the New York Times have Edna Bonacich and Alicia Keys been mentioned in the same article?

For that matter, how many times in the history of the NYT has Edna Bonacich been mentioned at all?

Mr. Young, who is executive director of the West Coast guild, is well acquainted with corporate strength, something he confronted during the mid-1990s as a leader in the unions that sought unsuccessfully to organize garment workers employed by Guess Inc.

Writing of that campaign in the fall/winter 2005 issue of The American Sociologist, Edna Bonacich, a sociologist who worked closely with Mr. Young both then and later at the writers guild, noted that “he studied Sun Tzu’s ‘The Art of War’ with deep attention, trying to find its applicability to union struggles.” (The fascination has been shared by modern students of conflict as diverse as Douglas MacArthur, Lee Atwater and Michael S. Ovitz.)Should Mr. Young and his colleagues make only small gains next week, they could make a midcourse correction in their strike strategy and sidestep the dangers of a protracted fight against a strong opponent. They could return to work without a contract, with an eye toward joining the much larger Screen Actors Guild in a renewed strike next June.

-Hollywood and Strikers Watch Clock (NYT, 11/21)

A: at least four times since 1997. (One of which is Steven Greenhouse's report on the UC Santa Barbara Wal-Mart Conference.)

The autonomists would have a field day with this.

His colleague Paula Pell, a 13-year veteran and another head writer, added: “It was uplifting. So much of what the strike is about is valuing the creative brain.” Like the other writers Ms. Pell had been on the picket line; she and Ms. Dratch improvised some strike-oriented material for Debbie Downer, Ms. Dratch’s sad-sack character. Strike talks are to resume on Nov. 26.

One sticking point is residual payments for online content, particularly relevant for this show, which has spawned several Internet triumphs. After flashing a card that read, “An SNL Digital Short,” Andy Samberg and Mr. Armisen performed one, a gay-oriented rap by Mr. Samberg starring Mr. Armisen as the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. (Ms. Jones and the hairy rear cameoed.)

Lorne Michaels, the show’s producer, watched and occasionally laughed from the audience, but Ms. Poehler noted that he was not involved, and he left immediately after. (It was his birthday.) Tickets for the show were going for as much as $300 each on Craigslist (officially the price was $20), but many in the standing-room crowd were comedy cognoscenti: writers from other late-night shows and actors like John Krasinski of “The Office.”

“This is the show I would’ve been crushed if I’d heard about it the day after,” said Samm Levine, an actor (“Freaks and Geeks”) from Los Angeles who performs at the Upright Citizens Brigade theater when he’s in New York.

(I'm referring, of course, to the reappropriation/expropriation of the workplace and the technologies of work, "valuing the creative brain" as what a young Toni Negri might have called 'self-valorization,' rather than the presence of the inimitable Samm Levine, which deserves commentary in its own right, but you won't find any here.)

but wait, there's more

I'm also finding it difficult to deal with what seems like a conflation of big-L Labor (as in the house of, as in the AFL-CIO, as in cold war liberalism) with small-l labor, as in the creation of value, as in the work that people do that transforms nature and without which there is no capitalism. The former does not have a monopoly over the latter and did not in the 1960s, and one would hope a treatment of the new left's labor politics might have more to say on the subject than just detailing its often cordial and often fraught relationships with the AFL-trade union bureaucracy as well as the more left-wing leadership of 1199 and District 65 (an ancestor of the UAW's Technical, Office, and Professional department and Local 2110 more specifically.) talking about "blacks" (small b) and "labor" (small l) as two discreet entities, even during the jim crow era, is similarly problematic - because African American workers formed their own unions and their own organizations within white unions (like the Dining Car Waiters of the Hotel and Restaurant Employees, - see Eric Arnesen's Brotherhoods of Color) and fought against both the employers and the racism of white unions, because the noble effort to extricate black bodies from their inscription as 'mere labor' notwithstanding, the african american populations of both the deep south and the urban north were racialized as labor, as people genetically primed (biologically or 'culturally') for certain kinds of work, and ineligible for certain kinds of social citizenship and privilege. Looking at black political movements as somehow outside of questions of labor, as Levy seems to in the first few chapters of his book, flirts with the mystification, and therefore reification (what you don't see can hurt you) of the specific ways in which black labor is racialized and rendered either invisible or pathological by racist state and capitalist optics.

I ran into my aunt and her semi-separated(?) husband on the street today. First time i'd seen her since my grandmother's funeral last september. Very strange, and kind of sad.

I'm making slow progress down my exam list. Today i finally finished (after five years of trying) Nick Dyer-Witheford's Cyber-Marx, and read the intro and first chapter (thus far) of Levy's The New Left and Labor in the 1960s. The former seems at once extraordinarily prescient and strangely dated (perhaps because of its prescience,) while the latter seems overly simplistic thus far in its analysis of race and its reading of leftist political commitments, so i'm hoping it gets better later on. It's not so much that it's undertheorized - though after NDW's autonomist marxism-meets-media-theory most labor history reads that way - as that there's not enough of a critical inquiry into the stakes and assumptions implicit in the notion of a labor-new left alliance -- and the claim that the New Left was principally, or even entirely, a Student movement proscribes the scope and limits of such a discussion. Work by Arif Dirlik and Immanuel Wallerstein, and Georgy Katsiaficas, among others, might complicate this kind of limited or overly localized account. (And here i demonstrate my debt to Michael Denning's Socialism and Marxism in the 20th Century syllabus.) Lest i sound too critical, let me say that the archival work Levy does is fascinating, as are some of the connections he's able to make - Stokely Carmichael hanging out with the children of CPUSA bigwigs at Bronx Science and organizing with AFSME in DC as a Howard University student being, for me, the most intriguing.

I'm stepping out for a hot chocolate. Then it's back to the east balcony of the tenth floor of the panopticon, which seems to be the one place in Bobst that's dimly lit and sparsely populated enough for me to get work done.

The Columbia University Hunger Strike, which lasted more than a week, and won three of the striker's four major demands, is over, though organizing continues. I've never been a huge fan of hunger strikes as a student organizing tactic because they can be incredibly disempowering, they don't necessarily create a sustained palpable disruption, and they can block further organizing if they fail. The folks at Columbia seem to have done everything right - using the hunger strike as a means to attract attention to and create an urgency for their demands, while engaging in broad based coalitional politics and organizing work, to create a mass movement on campus and bring the administration to the table. The one plank they didn't win - shifting the course of the university's expansion into West Harlem, was arguably the most ambitious, the most direct challenge to the university's power and plans for neoliberal 'growth.' To say this, however, is not to discount the substantial core curricular reforms and support for Ethnic Studies that the strikers did secure - victories which i know i and many others find inspiring and full of implications for our work on our own campuses. This is not so much a congratulations - because the strikers would likely tell us that the struggle is not yet won - as a statement of solidarity with and admiration for their work.

As the Equal Rights and Access Committee of GESO put it,

As the Equal Rights and Access Standing Committee of the graduate teachers union at Yale University, we support your struggle to hold Columbia accountable to the principles of equality and respect for all people inside and outside the institution. We, like you, wonder whether universities (must) perpetuate the systems of oppression that they claim to challenge. You challenge Columbia to confront their role in, as you put it, "a world in which racist, gendered, and sexualized hierarchies dominate the way power flows." Your demands for curricular and thus intellectual change articulate the way in which the knowledge produced in and by universities enables these harmful actions. We draw inspiration from your willingness to take direct
action to institute greater democracy on your campus.

Your struggle also speaks to other universities. Like you, we face a university that plays an increasingly dominant political and economic role in its host community and seeks to reshape it in its own image. This manifests in the forms of escalating gentrification and policing. Our administration, like yours has disregarded the voice of students, workers, community members, and faculty, and has failed to address the systemic discrimination that exists on our campus....

Instead of seeing Selma James speak last night, i went to Lemongrass with R and S and sang some Karaoke - Benatar's "Heartbreaker" - original lyrics, not the strike version - S and i sang "Run For Your Life," which is a deeply, deeply problematic song. Then we did Metallica's "One" again, which the nerdy dudes in the back got really into, and I finished with "November Rain" to mark the two year anniversary of the GSOC strike and as an earnest gesture of support for all the unions that are on strike right now. Unfortunately i picked the crappy truncated version with no "Slash Walks out of the Church" solo and no "Slash gets up on top of the piano" cool ending part. basically it ends when they jump through the cake. So lame.

Now i have to make up for all of this by reading, so I'm at the panopticon and i'm not leaving for a while.

Food service workers employed by the subcontractor Aramark at 55 Water Street and New York Life, in the Financial District, are on strike. Here's the email bulletin from Unite HERE

NYC's Other Strike: Cafeteria Workers for City's Biggest Companies Strike at Two New York Landmarks

Workers in the executive dining rooms and corporate cafeterias for some of New York City's most prestigious companies went on strike on November 12th at two city landmarks.

Striking workers, members of UNITE HERE Local 100, vowed to walk picket lines at New York Life and 55 Water Street until their employer, the Philadelphia-based contractor ARAMARK, settles contracts with them.

ARAMARK food service workers at the Fashion Institute of Technology and Citigroup have already voted to authorize a strike at their locations, and collective bargaining agreements continue to expire at ARAMARK cafeterias across the city. If the company does not commit to raising standards, workers at cafeterias at Bank of New York, CBS, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase and the United Nations could join the strike as their contracts expire.

(I)N(S)YU, or, Someone's been reading their Saskia Sassen

Global expansion is the core of what Sexton calls his "ICE" concept: his idea that, by 2050, the world will adopt an economy of "intellectual, cultural and educational activity" that will result in the emergence of worldwide "idea capitals" dedicated to encouraging and attracting creative, entrepreneurial and economic talent.

Participation in this "ICE" sector, Sexton says, is not only an opportunity for NYU to gain prominence in the global dialogue but a key element of its survival and fundamental mission.

"It starts off with our embrace of otherness in who we are and our comfort in being a genuinely integrated part of the city," Sexton said. "This is our personality, so we don't gate ourselves off, we don't retreat, we don't mind having our campus interrupted with other buildings instead of an NYU building."

Potential "ICE" cities that the university is considering for future global regional campuses include Paris and Shanghai, Sexton said.

"ICE?" Seriously?

addendum

this is pretty great, and reminds me of some of the lighter (read, colder) moments from the NYU strike.

3:30 p.m. One writer suggests that we walk counter-clockwise. A minor fracas occurs between those who think this is a great idea and those who believe it might undo all our work for the past two and a half hours.

Why You SHOULD Support The Writers' Strike

Yes, there's something alluring, if anachronistic (hearkening back to Hollywood's red days and the pre-HUAC thirties) and perhaps ridiculous about the photographs of America Ferrera and, in Grey's Anatomy scrubs, Sandra Oh and Ellen Pompeo walking the WGA picket lines in solidarity with the strikers, and press has tended to focus on the disruptions the strike causes (no more Daily Show, so much for Steven Colbert's presidential aspirations, etc, how will we ever get to see Jack Bauer valorize torture?) rather than what's at stake in the demands and dispute which have brought us to this moment.

I want to argue that you should support the strike, not ironically, and not only because it's the right thing to do to support strikes that aren't hate strikes and aren't out to disenfranchise one group of workers at another's expense, but instead because what's at stake here winds up being rather important.

Sure, the Jane Espensons of the world aren't exactly an immiserated proletariat. They make lots of money. They don't work in mines. They're mostly white, mostly male. Why should you give a fuck?

Because what's at stake here winds up being the relationship between the labor that generates "intellectual property" and the ownership and distribution rights of said "property, a key question" for those of interested in questions of what Andrew Ross has called "the Mental Labor problem," or what the Italian autonomist marxists - notably Lazzarato, call immaterial labor - the labor that generates the informational and cultural content of the commodity. What control intellectual workers should have over what they produce winds up being relevant to a far broader swathe of workers than well-paid TV writers. Think of international graduate student researchers in biology labs at universities all over the country, helping to produce pharmaceutical and other medical patents in which they will have no ownership rights. The two cases are not quite the same - the writers are simply asking for a stake in one particular arena, that of digital reproduction of the tv show - but still they seem to be to be calling the question of who owns and profits from intellectual work.

We may, ultimately, want to throw out the entire concept of intellectual property as extremely deleterious for much of the world, or as now stifling the very innovation it was supposed to encourage and protect. That's fine. I don't think such a goal and supporting the strikers demands are mutually exclusive though. As long as profit is the extraction of the unpaid (excess) labor that goes into the production of a commodity, attempts to recognize that labor, to bring it to the fore, are important and worth fighting for.

That said, we can't ignore the role that other forms of labor play in the creation of the tv show as a commodity and as a unit of intellectual property. We can't fetishize the writers and their celebrated creative work as the only labor that makes possible the creation, or even the writing of a television show. I'm thinking not only of camerapeople, editors, set designers, but also parking productions assistants, janitors, food service workers, the workers who actually work in the factories that produce the dvds and tivos and home theater systems that have precipitated the so-called revolution in viewing which has led the writers to make the demands that the studios are refusing to meet, as well as, perhaps, the people who clean the writers' apartments, take care of their children, cook the food they eat. So while we should support the writer's strike, we should also insist that it be augmented, broadened to address the often invisible forms of labor that we don't often think about in conversations about creative labor and intellectual property.

Now back to my exam.

ipod shuffle

Donny Hathaway - "You've Got A Friend"

The Just Brothers - "Sliced Tomatoes." (Pretty cool, understated surf-soul guitar-driven instrumental.)

Little Milton - "More & More"

The Cure - "Torture." Rana's favorite song, clearly.

Marnie Stern - "Logical Volume"

Bob Marley and the Wailers - "Memphis" - from the early reggae period featuring the Upsetters and lots of soul covers aqnd some fantastic acoustic instrumentation.

The dB's "Ask For Jill." "There is a girl on the fourth or fifth floor/buzz at reception slightly disheveled." Not my favorite song off "Repercussions, but pretty good in that dB's shhepish masculinity kind of way.

Ghostface Killah - "Child's Play" The "Bridge is Over" interpellations make this song that much weirder.

The Clientele - "Monday's Rain"

Beatles - "Everybody's got something to hide except for me and my monkey." Possibly the best song title in the history of popular music

Secular white ethnic anti-black police state fascism and evangelical fundamentalist homophobic masculinist militarism, together at last

Pat Robertson endorses Rudolph Giuliani


pictures stolen from some weird blog and The Onion, respectively.

We could make him change a flat tire, or we could all at once retire

I left the apartment at the crack of dawn and walked into bobst, graded two papers, one good and one extremely poor, which was disconcerting. I'm in the process of finishing "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," which is interesting and more engaging than i thought it would be based on previous engagement with Althusser. I've been using my dad's ancient copy of Lenin and Philosophy and it split in two last night, though the relevant essay remains intact, which i suppose is convenient.

I interrupted the Althusser twice Well, more than that, but there were two big interruptions. The first time was for lunch. On the way to corporate sweatshop burrito chain i ran into some former Yale grad students I knew from New Haven on the street and they were extraordinarily nice to me. I then stopped again to read this on one of the computers in LL1. It's still resonating in my brain. The whole weekend makes graduate school seem more exciting and useful and good than it has been thus far, and that's no small feat given how low i've sunk at various points throughout the last year or two.

Anyway, random shuffle:
Pavement - "Here"
Ultramagnetic MC's "Mentally Mad"
Nick Drake - "Road"
Clipse - "We Got It For Cheap"
Charles Mingus - "Wham Bam Thank You Ma'am"
Super Rail Band - "Maliyo"
Clash - "Tommy Gun"
Spoon - "Sister Jack"
Desmond Dekker - "Music Like Dirt"
The Coup - " 5 Million Ways to Kill a CEO"

“The camera relieves us of the burden of memory. It surveys us like God, and it surveys for us. Yet no other god has been so cynical, for the camera records in order to forget.”

That's John Berger, from Ways of Seeing, i think. Anne McClintock quoted it today in her talk at the conference at Barnard to commemorate the 20th anniversary of Hazel Carby's Reconstructing Womanhood, in reference to Abu Ghraib, Gitmo, and the visual politics of torture. McClintock's piece was insightful and provocative, but Berger's claim is itself deeply provocative, and i think it is often true, Cure songs not withstanding, ( or perhaps Smith's lyrical persona constructed through the tropes of loss and a very obvious disintegration is instead illustrative.) So I am glad that i took no pictures today, to apply said insight in the most banal, generalized, and dehistoricized of all possible ways, because it was not something I want or intend to forget.

racist ex-defense secretaries and their Yalien apologists

In a series of internal musings and memos to his staff, then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld argued that Muslims avoid "physical labor" and wrote of the need to "keep elevating the threat," "link Iraq to Iran" and develop "bumper sticker statements" to rally public support for an increasingly unpopular war...

"You are running a story based off of selective quotations and gross mischaracterizations from a handful of memos -- carefully picked from the some 20,000 written while Rumsfeld served as Secretary," Rumsfeld aide Keith Urbahn wrote in an e-mail. "After almost all meetings, he dictated his recollections of what was said for his own records."

I'd post a link to that blogpost KU put up a couple years ago applauding a french motorist for running down and nearly murdering a muslim man on the grounds that he looked like Osama Bin Laden, but he wisely seems to have removed said blog from the internet...

In lieu of anything more substantive, i defer to my examinations and my teaching load and instead belatedly offer a random shuffle for last friday.

The Cure. "Love song." The 311 cover and the whole emo thing kind of ruin this sing for me. I thought it was really profound when i was in high school. I think most people do. Or most people who know it when they're in high school, at any rate.

Booker T and the MG's - "Time Is Tight." This is a pretty incredible song, and you get a sense of how versatile the band was when you realize it's basically the same people playing on "Hold On, I'm Coming" or "Sitting on the Dock of the Bay," two songs which sound like they're in a different decade and genre from this one.

Liz Phair - "Canary." Weird moment in Exile in Guyville. Minute long piano solo intro and then the vocals kick in and it's incredibly bitter and fierce and fascinating. I skip to "Fuck and Run" too often.

Go-Betweens - "Boundary Rider."

Neko Case - "Maybe Sparrow."

Dusty Springfield - "Live Here With You." I have mixed feelings about owning this record.

Blind Melon - "All That I Need." Stop laughing. It's not a bad song.

De La Soul - "Millie Pulled a Pistol on Santa" This song samples six others, layering them on top of each other.

Curtis Mayfield - "We Got to Have Peace."

Grant McLennan - "Malibu 69". RIP.

wow

That's like four years of David Swensen, right there...

The independent arbitrator peiceing through the ruins of the sabotaged election process at Yale-New Haven hospital has ruled that the hospital engaged in a "methodical dismantling of the terms and commitments of the election principles agreement" and has fined YNHH 4.5 million dollars, almost half of which will go directly to aggrieved workers. The report itself is at times chilling.

Why such conduct doesn't demonstrate to the same arbitrator the necessity of card check neutrality in such an atmosphere of intimidation and managerial terror tactics, I cannot begin to understand.

Is it full compensation? Not quite, said Meyerson. "Full compensation would be winning the process by which workers would have the right to freely and fairly choose to unionize."

Para leer a la universidad neoliberal

“This place is magic,” Michael Morand ’87 DIV ‘93, Yale Associate Vice President for New Haven and State Affairs, said in an interview with the News. “Yale is a magic kingdom, and this has extended the magic.” (Yale Daily News, 10/19/07)

This quote is interesting not simply for its excess, its absurdity, but because in terming a 20 billion dollar corporation sitting in the middle of one of the U.S.'s poorest cities "magic kingdom," (the geek in me wonders which one - Mordor?) Morand is revealing some profound truths about the optics and ideologies of the neoliberal university. Magic kingdoms, as Dorfman and Mattlelart would remind us, erase the realities of labor, of exploitation in favor of self-sweeping brooms, axes chopping firewood without arms to swing them. Yale as magic kindgom, perhaps the most exaggerated and thus paradigmatic example of the university's elitist, exceptionalist, self-representation. Amidst the glitz of new libraries the people who will clean them, make them run, and teach overflowing FORMAC sections in their basement classrooms fade from view. But without them the edifice collapses, the university does not run. And New Haven's interactions with and role in the immiseration of New Haven's racialized geography of labor and difference can't be ignored either. Yale is the medical debt burdens hanging over the heads of its med school library clerical staff. It is sixty six years of picket lines and a dozen homeless people sleeping on park benches in the New Haven green. There is no difference between the university and the "real world;" universities like Yale, like NYU, like Columbia are high stakes, large scale, often violent participants in urban and global economies through endowment investments, through real estate, through the patenting and privatization of knowledge. Morand suggests that Yale's new library "extends" the magic of the university's privilege and power, but it can not and has never been able to fully obfuscate the conditions of its existence - which is its imperial presence, and the movements which are contantly seeking to trouble and transform it.

Please Put Rambo Back Inside Your Pants

Continuing this blog's longstanding interest in the cultural politics of peeing on stuff, (not as kinky or gross as it sounds,) I was thinking recently, as i cleaned my apartment and tried to straighten up my cd collection, about songs which employ the trope of urinating on memorials to capitalism and imperialism and racism as an anarchic and liberatory act. Perhaps i have gone off the deep end.

I am thinking specifically about two different moments in Bay Area radicalism. The Dead Kennedys' "Stars and Stripes of Corruption," from 1985's Frankenchrist, acknowledges the phallicity of state warmongering (the title of this post) but nevertheless reads pissing on the Washington Monument as an act which can conjure forth a radically other vision of the patriotic, and indeed, the nation itself. The Coup's "Piss On Your Grave," (from Steal This Album (1999)) explores the histories of racialized slavery, imperialism, and labor exploitation as a counternarrative to a tour of George Washington's grave which culminates in Boots/the narrator "fins ta take a pee pee" on the headstone and a loud trickling noise and panicked tour guide followed by a blitz of flash bulbs a la the Japanese tourists in Ski Patrol, a wry comment, i think, on the possible limits of politics as bodily spectacle.

These tracks are both epic in scope and length - "Stars and Stripes" is over six minutes long and concludes perhaps the Dead Kennedys' most experimental and ambitious record. "Piss on your grave" is nearly as long, a standout track on an album full of them. Pissing, in both, becomes a gesture of a masculinity in revolt, In Biafra, the masculinity may or may not be slightly queered. For Boots Riley this is about black communist masculinity, aggrieved by capitalism's degradation of black womanhood -- " girls work till they back ache and their breasts don't lactate, " for instance, or "That bitch ass on the front of a buck/never gave a fuck/he forced his black women slaves/to give him dick sucks/and when he bust a nut/he'd laugh and cackle/let the leather whip crackle/send 'em back to pick tobacco/shackled." Revolutionary nationalism via the prostrate and wounded black female body, the scene of subjection. For both, pissing is a radical act of refusal, a masculinist rejection of an emasculating social order - for Biafra it initiates and makes possible the claim that the "real patriots" are "those with the guts to work for some real change."

Biafra's song is interesting too for its simultaneous rejection of the masculinist, phallic logics of neoconservative militarist foreign policy and its turn towards queer punk machismo in the same move. Pissing on the Washington Monument is both a reclamation of hijacked national political discourse of freedom, "the people," etc, and visible, and smellable (olfactory?) marking, not only of territory, but of disgust, and of superiority to a debased political culture. But the "standing above" of this rebellion through micturation seems ill equipped to imagine broader social transformations which also call into question masculinity in its more subtle and pernicious forms...

random shuffle:
Jean Grae: "Whatever"
Architecture in Helsinki: "Do The Whirlwind
New Pornographers: "From Blown Speakers"
Guided By Voices: "Striped White Jets"
The (international) Noise Conspiracy: "Will It Ever Be Quiet?"
Camper Van Beethoven: "Epigram #2"
Annakonda: "Wheedle's Grove"
The Clash: "Somebody Got Murdered."
Black Merda - "Over and Over"
The Specials - "Do Nothing"

random shuffle

Mahavishnu Orchestra - "Vital Transformation." I think this was my favorite track on Inner Mounting Flame when i was in high school, though it's been a while and I can't really remember. McLaughlin's great, and the violinist is amazing.

Snooky and the Cosmic Flowers - "Hearing Things." From the Golden State Funk compilation. Good stuff.

Minutemen - "Please Don't Be Gentle With Me."

XTC - "Life Begins at The Hop."

Harmonettes - "Can't Go Halfway." From the Numero group Belize City Boil Up compilation. There are numerous factually innacurate statements in this song, such as "if you want to have a smoke, you've got to have tobacco." Nevertheless I like this song.

Pere Ubu - "Street Waves."

The Advantage - "Double Dragon 2 (Story and Boss Music)." Crappy video game, good theme music. The sucess of an endeavor like this band demands in a large part on how seriously they take themselves. The more, the better. I don't like irony very much. More on that later, maybe.

Siouxsie & The Banshees - "Happy House.." Great song. Someone should cut a version of De La Soul's "Kicked Out The House" with a beat that samples this song. Or maybe that would be too ironical.

Black Merda - "Good Luck." I discovered this album this summer. It's amazing. Go find a copy.


Camper Van Beethoven - "O Death."

I can't sleep and i'm inexplicably itchy - i think it's an allergic reaction to something. At some point I'll write a post about how Dwight Hall's board, apparently totally disconnected from its activists and student leaders, wants to throw in its endowment with Yale's, which could place the funds of the center for public service and social justice in places like Argentinian shoe factories that don't pay their workers for years, private and abusive U.S. prison corporations, calamitous attempts to privatize natural resources, and oil wars, none of which seem to align well with Dwight Hall's various stated mission. The proposed bone they want to throw concerned parties, to create a separate, socially responsible fund, is really somewhat ridiculous, as if such a move could somehow balance or offset the very real problems inherent in how we know Yale invests its money. Putting a couple thousand bucks in microlending or whatever is nice and all, but it doesn't render any less fucked up the three million that's gobbling up Argentina's telecommunications industry or riding IMF structural adjustment privatization to coal power in Indonesia...

But for the moment I'm lying awake, reading Josh Freeman's Working Class New York, enjoying the schaadenfreude of the Yankees' loss to the indians (thank you, gnats of Lake Eerie,) and marveling at Manny Ramirez's dramatic three run home run in the bottom of the ninth to beat the angels. It takes my mind off the mets a little. Not too much though.

Freeman's book is fascinating. I took it off my exam list at the last second, but i think it needs to go back on now.

October 5th? I'll be there.

Gotta love that "David Marks."

To protest UC Berkeley's new deal with B(ritish) P(etroleum), students wheeled a big green and yellow (BP logo colors) trojan horse onto campus and poured molasses on the sidewalk to symbolize the baleful politics of oil capitalism.

"UC Berkeley is becoming an extension campus of Big Oil U," John Simpson of the Santa Monica-based Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights said at the protest.

Most of the demonstrators, wearing "I didn't enroll in BP-UC" T-shirts, appeared to be UC students. They say the university's research agenda is being set by corporate interests.

random shuffle

Linton Kwesi Johnson - "Di Black Petty Booshwah" (Dub)
The Bats - "Mr. Peculiar."
Teenage Fanclub - "The World'll Be OK"
Spoon - "Don't Make Me A Target"
Otis Redding - "Mr. Pitiful."
The dB's - "I Feel Good (Today.)"
Wolf Parade - "Dinner Bells"
Badly Drawn Boy - "Magic In The Air" (Haven't listened to this album in like six and a half years.)
Wilderness - "Your Hands."
John Coltrane - "Serenity."

Zurich is Stained

(and Transport is Arranged.)

Late night random ipod shuffle playlist.

1. Sleater-Kinney, "Call The Doctor". I knwo it's a critique of the heteronormative biopolitics of medical knowledge and practice, but this song also remids me that i should, in fact, call the doctor. And then i imagine Corin Tucker shaking her head in disgust, which is really just badly disguised egotism on my part.

2.Madvillan, "Meat Grinder." I swear this song samples the bass line from Rush's "Tom Sawyer." In high school, when i "worked" at this ska label in the east village, i had a friend who was obsessed with Rush. He even put out a zine called "Rudies for Rush."

3.Sonic Youth, "Karen Revisited," from Murray Street, which got talked about as a "comeback album," post NYC Ghosts and Flowers. This song is really long. Even for Sonic Youth.

4. J-Dilla, "One For Ghost."

5.Company Flow, "Last Good Sleep." Also really long.

6.Curtis Mayfield, "Underground." One of his best.

7.Aretha Franklin, "Rock Steady." Desmond Dekker might disagree, or maybe not.

8.M.I.A. "Bingo." Not my favorite track off Arular.

9.The Unicorns, "Tuff Ghost." I still haven't decided whether or not i like this band and its various offshoots. Is the title a Marley reference?

10. Run-D.M.C. "Proud to be Black." Along with "Hard Times," their forray into "conscious rap." Possibly as counterpoint to "My Adidas" following the rescinding of "don't want nobody's name on my behind?"

Generously Endowed

...And cue annual NYT David Swensen panegyric NOW.

Nevertheless, Mr. Swensen, who was an early leader in creating a strategy of investments diversified beyond stocks and bonds, outperformed rivals. He argued in his book “Pioneering Portfolio Management” that depending solely on stocks and bonds would not necessarily provide enough protection to a fund. His approach has led Yale’s endowment into hedge funds, private equity funds and hard assets like timber and oil and gas, and made his performance one that is closely watched by Wall Street.

Sadly, yaleinsider.org and unfarallon.info are no longer available, but readers of this blog will be join me in recognizing the major environmental, labor, geopolitical, and, um, ethical problems involved in Yale's investments in these areas - be they hedge funds, water rights in colorado, forests in Maine, or oil and gas in Alberta and/or the Sudan.

The GM strike looks to be over.

UAW president Ron Gettelfinger won't discuss details with the media, but claims that there's good job security language, in addition ot the VEBA trust that's so controversial among the rank and file.

Specifics of the funding for the trust were not available, but Mr. Gettelfinger said it would “secure the benefits of our retirees” and every G.M. hourly worker now at the company. He said the fund, which would last for 80 years, “would be solvent” throughout that time.A primary concern for U.A.W. leaders, who have seen such funds at other companies run dry, forcing the union to grab concessions so that they could be replenished. Mr. Gettelfinger hinted that if this fund runs low, G.M. would make new investments in it. Asked if there was a “backstop” for it, Mr. Gettelfinger said, “I’m not going into details, but I like that word.”

But the times suggests there may also be a two tier wage system implemented which would sharply differentiate between new employees and those with seniority. Similarly the VEBA language used above says nothing about new hires, only "every G.M. hourly worker now at the company." Is the UAW being forced to mortgage its future in order to save its present?

Because i'm really big on commemorating stuff that happened in 2002-2003 on this blog...

It's actually been five years since this.

The demonstrators left College Street in groups, led by police. Many demonstrators said they were not nervous but proud to be arrested.

"I really am for this 110 percent," Local 35 member Margaret Nelson said. "We need this. We are Yale."

Reports have UAW members at General Motors walking out. The UAW web site is currently down because of heavy traffic. Here's an article from the most recent Labor Notes, a magazine with whom i often disagree, (i.e., do AFSCME officials really have any leg to stand on when they bash SEIU?) on some of the issues that members have had with these negotiations.

Edit: From the AP report:

Worker Anita Ahrens burst into tears as hundreds of United Auto Workers
streamed out of a GM plant in Janesville, Wis.
"Oh my God, here they come,"
said Ahrens, 39. "This is unreal."
Ahrens has seven years at the plant,
where she works nights installing speakers in sport utility vehicles. She waited
outside the building Monday for her husband, Ron Ahrens, who has worked there
for 21 years.
The couple has three children, including a college freshman,
and Ahrens worried about how they would pay their bills.
"This is horrible,
but we're die-hard union, so we have to," Ahrens said. "We got a mortgage, two
car payments and tons of freaking bills."

Labor Notes.

The clerical workers' strike at the University of Minnesota appears to have ended, but workers don't seem particularly happy about the contract proposal. The IHE article suggests that the union is caving under the threat of health care benefit withdrawal, and has the university bragging as much.

Meanwhile, the U.A.W. is gearing up for a strike at G.M....

Department bar night was at the karaoke bar. This was kind of awesome. Got there late though, because of GSOC "meet your union" event, which had way better turnout than i was expecting given the minimal amount of organizing I did for it. I reprised "Holy Diver," which was fun, "Fuck and Run," which may have pissed some folks off, and Madness's "Our House," which for some reason I mangled - a combination of my getting sick from not sleeping enough/the mouse in my apartment maybe giving me meningitis or something - and just generally being exhausted after a busy day involving a massive load of laundry, a very short haircut, a contentious meeting (making me miss the UOC and that kind of respectful, professional, but loving and supportive organizing environment - that sounds childish) and a fair amount of reading.

I've been thinking about The Silver Jews' "Send in the Clowns," my favorite song off American Water, which the artist formerly known as Sam G. inadvertently sold me on sometime during my first year of college and which retroactively became one of my favorite albums of the late 1990s. (I would have figured this out earlier if i'd listened to pavement prior to 1999 instead of, like, Skavoovie and The Epitones or Jump With Joey...) (Ok, and Charles Mingus and Wes Montgimery and Pat Metheny) There is a line "I'm going to bury my name in you," and I keep thinking about the ways in which gender(ed) violence permeates this phrase and totally shifts the terms of the song and jars the listener. I don't really ahve anything profound to say about this, because again, I'm sick and sniffly, and there are mice in my apartment.

Silly Undergrads, Financial Aid is for Bribery

Recently appointed NYU trustee for life Catherine Reynolds (among the first recipients of whose new $50k fellowship was Bryan Levine, architect of the GAC company union proposal, which ultimately led to the House of Delegates, on which i sit) runs a student loan company which has been charging students extraordinarily inflated interest rates.

A loan company led by NYU trustee Catherine B. Reynolds is being accused of overcharging students and abusing its status as a nonprofit organization, according to the Washington Post.

On NYU's financial aid website, the company was included on a list of financial aid providers until WSN recently asked about the allegations.

The loan company goes by both EduCap and Loan to Learn, and is also closely linked to the foundation. The Internal Revenue Service is examining its business practices, the Post reported, which have made Reynolds rich enough to form the Catherine B. Reynolds Foundation and donate hundreds of millions of dollars to a laundry list of charitable organizations and universities.

But, according to the newspaper, the company was lending money to students with interest rates of up to 18 percent - well above the federal student loan cap of 8.5 percent.

Meanwhile at a "multicultural" forum with freshmen of color, John Sexton brags about how little financial aid NYU students receive.

Sexton responded that because NYU's endowment is only $2 billion, the existence of the university is based on tuition. However, he said that "one in five" get a Pell Grant, a federal loan for students from low-income families, and he praised students for their hard work in order to pay for the tuition.

"Half of our undergraduates work two jobs," Sexton said. "Five hundred undergrads work three jobs. That shows they really wanted an NYU education."

That says it all, doesn't it?

two quick links

Congressional democrats are trying to legislatively overturn the Kentucky River decision...

and

Students at the U of Minnesota have begun a hunger strike to support striking campus workers.

At the close of Guns 'N' Roses' "epic" nine minute, forty second long video for "Estranged," after Axl's suicide attempt has been foiled by samaritan cetaceans and slash has popped out of the turgid waved for one final solo, we cut from Axl's sneaker sinking into the dpeths as Izzy Stradlin pulls him to safety via rope ladder extended from helicopter to Axl chilling with one of his savior dolphins. The dolphin makes clicking noises, as is his wont, and the phrase "Lose Your Illusion" is scribbled across the screen in Axl's handwriting.

What I wonder now, having watched the video for the first time in a long many years is, is this supposed to be a translation from the dolphin?

What might the implications of this be? Does this fundamentally reshape how we understand Use Your Illusion? Or at least Use Your Illusion II? Does the dolphin signify something other than the problematically gendered redemptive nature, the maternal ocean? Is this a self conscious critique of GNR as a cultural form and as a political project? Or is the dolphin just telling Axl Rose to lose the stupid Charles Manson T-shirt?

Ah, cutting, incisive, student journalism. How could the university function without thee?

If the delicious fare synonymous with NYU's events wasn't enough, students and community had plenty of food for thought at the "NYU Plans 2031" open house last night.

Tonight's karaoke setlist.

I started out with a rendition of Holy Diver. The crowd enjoyed it. i think.

My next song was a duet of Liz Phair's "Fuck and Run" with Stefanie's friend Isabel.

Then Stefanie and I did a ridiculously awesome version of "You Could Be Mine." Ostensibly as an ironic comment on the song's profound sexism. We were awesome, but i wish they had "Estranged."

My last song was a duet with Rana on the Stevie Nicks/Tom Petty song "Stop Dragging My Heart Around."

omg.

Proud of his Jewish heritage, Green delivered the decisive blow on the first night of Rosh Hashana, the high holiday that marks the Jewish New Year.

"It's really nice to contribute any game, but I guess if you put it in that perspective it adds a little bit to it," said Green, undecided about whether he'll sit out next weekend on Yom Kippur, which he's done twice before.

I taught my first two sections yesterday, (World Cultures: Contemporary Latino Cultures) at 8:00 and 9:30 in the morning on opposite sides of campus (houston and mercer and then 11th and university.) The first one went well. I was completely exhausted and barely coherent by the end of the second section. It was exciting nonetheless. And a little surreal. And sort of fun.

I then went home to get out of the rain, started grading (which is a pretty horrible, harrowing, and nerve-wracking exercise if you've never done it,) and promptly fell asleep around 2 PM. I woke up and the clock said 5:30 and i thought it was five thirty in the morning and i freaked out and then i realized it might be afternoon, but i was sure i'd slept twenty-seven hours instead of three and a half. It was pretty disorienting

The class is going well. The professor i teach for has been pretty good about critiquing the marginalized position the World Cultures curriculum occupies in relation the "Conversations of The West," as well as the problems in excluding latino cultures from the west, the problems that come with failing to understand colonialism and conquest as fundamental to the formaion and articulation of western modernity as performed by our more 'universal' counterparts in the MAP.

But i am boring myself, and I am way too overburdened between teaching, coursework, and my looming first exam to be blogging.

The New York City Taxi Workers Alliance is on strike for the first time since the Giuliani administration. The issue is the installation of GPS monitoring devices into the cabs, which drivers rightly see as taylorism on steroids. This "e-leaflet" is making the rounds on the internet:

STOP GPS SPYWARE IN TAXIS!
SUPPORT DRIVERS' AND PASSENGERS RIGHTS!
The Taxi & Limousine Commission wants to force cab drivers to install
GPS technology in all taxis. GPS is a bad deal for riders and for drivers:

~ GPS WILL NOT give drivers navigation software or online maps
~ GPS lets private companies track drivers' AND passengers' every move
~ GPS violates all our civil liberties and right to privacy
~ GPS will subject you to annoying broadcast ads during your ride
~ GPS will cause the meter to shut down if the technology fails
~ GPS failure will force you to interrupt your ride and hail another cab
~ Drivers will lose days of income while waiting for GPS repairs
~ Drivers' income will be hurt by higher lease rates because of GPS

JOIN DRIVERS AND PASSENGER FIGHTING FOR FAIRNESS!
PROTECT YOUR PRIVACY & DRIVERS'

You can help by:
Calling the Taxi Workers Alliance - 212-627-5248 and volunteering to help!

NYU's newest innovation in the arena of community relations? Paying off people already wealthy enough to live and park their cars in the village. Mike Morand would be so proud. Meanwhile, TA healthcare got slashed again, and tuition's up over 5% for like the seventh consecutive year...

For incoming freshmen and returning students to New York University, going off to college is an exciting time. But it's usually a big headache for people who live near one of the city's biggest universities. NY1's Candace Kelly explains why, and what that school is doing this year to help its neighbors cope.

Sunday is move-in day at New York University, as 4,000 freshmen will find a new home here. And as they're moving in, many area residents will be forced out of parking spaces.

“On moving day all the streets are blocked off and the cars are lined up one by one here and pulled onto the curb,” said Greenwich Village resident. “It's not that crazy, but it's a lot of commotion and a lot of people.”

”There are so many people and so many cars and everyone's trying to get a cart to move in,” said another.

Because so many areas have parking restrictions, for the first time ever, New York University will reimburse those who have to pay for using a parking garage.

“We're trying to figure out the best way to minimize some of the congestion in the area,” said Alicia Hurley, vice president of government and community affairs at NYU.

A couple of weeks ago, i was going to write a long post about how "Estranged" was the peak of the music video as hegemonic mass culture in the era of deindustrialization, deurbanization, and outsourcing. I picked "Estranged" because of the sheer excess - dolphins and aircraft carriers etc, and the historical moment - just as programs like Beavis and Butthead and The Real World begin to displace the music video on the basic cable channel that had made its name on such clips. But how can anyone watch this video and not think that nothing can surpass this for sheer arrogance and conceit?

edit: i guess this has to be a candidate too:

Of colonizing slivers and voracious appetites

The Brooklyn Paper is also picking up the Livingston Street "dorm" story:

New York University is coming to Brooklyn — and so is its voracious appetite for real estate.

The ever-growing private institution, based in Greenwich Village, is opening its first non- Manhattan residence in a Brooklyn Heights apartment tower, and is negotiating what it described as a “merger” with Downtown Brooklyn-based Polytechnic University.

One hundred and fifteen graduate students will move this month into the “sliver building” at 67 Livingston St., between Clinton and Court streets, which is named for the way its narrow 26-floors are wedged between wider buildings on the street. Since the late 1980s, the tower’s 76 units served as a dormitory for the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society. In March, a private investor bought it for $18.6 million and then leased it to NYU.

I had a strange dream last night involving an alternate version of Highway 61 Revisited sans "Desolation Row" and "Ballad of a Thin Man." I don't really know what to make of it.

I want to write a paper about Heathers.

Again, this feels like an iPhone advertisement, shiny, sleek, and vacuous. Is this where Talib Kweli was on the day that hip hop died?

Max Roach. RIP

I saw him play an hour long set with Cecil Taylor at the JVC Jazz Festival on the Columbia University campus seven years ago. Roach is one of the most important musicians of the twentieth century and in the long history of percussion. His importance to twentieth century African American culture, and to increasingly global - and urgently political forms of popular music, is difficult to overstate.

Last week someone asked me to think of soul/rare groove songs for a wedding mix. Instead i came up with a list of songs that it would be really awkward to hear at a someone's nuptuals. In no particular order:

Freda Payne, "band of gold." ("Now that you're gone/all that's left is a band of gold.")

Honey Cone, "Don't Send Me an Invitation" ("You loved two of us/one of us had to lose. I had but one regret - she's the one you'd choose.") And about 70%-80% of the invictus and hot wax records catalogues, definitely including 100 Proof's "Somebody's Been Sleeping in My Bed".

Ann Peebles: "I feel like breaking up somebody's home"

Roy C, "Shotgun Wedding," although this could be employed for irony's sake. It is a pretty hilarious song. ("I am the victim of a shotgun wedding.")

Curtis Mayfield, "Give It Up." Clearly.

Irma Thomas, "SHe'll Never Be Your Wife."

Dusty Springfield, "What Do You Do When Love Dies?"

The entire catalogues of Betty Wright and Betty Davis, though my friend is actually putting "Anti-Love song" on his mix, which is kind of hilarious. If you aren't familiar with either of these artists, Betty Wright is from Florida and sings songs about how she is going to steal your man. Betty Davis was briefly married to Miles Davis - and famously had an affair with Jimi Hendrix during that span. She sings very, very raunchy funk.

Martha and the Vandellas, "Nowhere to Run." ("I wake up feeling sorry i met you/hoping soon that i'll forget you.")

Bobby Bland, "I Wouldn't Treat a Dog The Way You Treated Me."

And i haven't even dealt with Country music, R&B after 1973, or rock. Suggestions? Arguments?



The Peru earthquake looks pretty terrible - hundreds dead so far. It seems trite and disrepectful to conjecture as to how much worse this could have been if the quake had produced a larger tsunami or given how violent an earthquake it seems to have been.

This week's karaoke setlist.
1.Iron Maiden, "The Trooper"
2. Journey, "Lights" - i fucked up the bridge.
3.Madness, "My Girl"
4. Metallica, "One," Duet with Stefanie. This was pretty hilarious.
5.The Smiths, "There Is a Light That Never Goes Out," Duet with Stefanie.
6. Blue Oyster Cult, "Burnin' For You"
7. CCR, "Have You Ever Seen The Rain."
8. Pat Benatar, "Invincible." with Rana.

I have recently come to believe that The Impressions' "Meeting Over Yonder" is among the most brilliant attempts at an overt linking of vernacular and popular musical forms and social movement organizing. What interests me and excites me about Mayfield's very simple, understated song - far moreseo than later work like "We're a Winner" and "This is my Country," let alone "(Don't Worry) If There's a Hell Below We're All Gonna Go" or "We Gotta Have Peace," is that it is a song that is about an organizing conversation - "hey, let's go to this meeting." That's basically the song. It's a song about an organizing conversation which is itself an organizing conversation. Not pedantic lecturing a la Dead Prez or "You Must Learn"-era BDP, just "After talking it out you all will agree that the best thing for you and me is going to the meeting over yonder." It's dialogic. And it participates in the kind of movement building it seeks to depict, and vice versa. (I wish I had a youtube clip, but there's only a video of Paul Weller's Style Council band covering it in 1984.)

Anyway I raise this because I just got back from Amherst and CGEU a couple of hours ago. It went well. Our panel on the lessons of the NYU fight was both too long and too short. I think my inexplicable migraine led me to gloss over things i wanted to stress. I hope we were still effective in communicating our message - on the way our understanding of whatr constitutes organbizing and how to do it has shifted radically since the contract expired, what role the strike played, what we;ve done since, and what the terrain on which we now organize looks like. There was a pretty interesting discussion of how contingent academic worker unions (the UAW jargon is "Academic Student Employee," which strikes me as a)redundant, b)a somewhat patronizing way to distinguish TAs, Research assistants, et alii from adjuncts and postdocs, and c)phonetically annoying like those ridiculous abbreviations everyone at stanford was throwing around when i visited in 12th grade. But that's really beside the point. I was struck this year by how many very, very good organizers there are in so many of the different unions that currently constitute the graduate (and undergraduate) employee labor movement, how important it is to create spaces to promote collective action and concerted strategies across unions and federations, how much potential there is in the movements of casualized academics to strike at the heart of the university-hospital-real estate-postindustrial complex and help chart a better future for schools, cities, and workers.

Phonebanking tomorrow. That and writing.

To get to Amherst, MA from NYC the quickest route involves taking 95 (or Hutch/Merritt/95) to New Haven and then getting on 91 for about 85 miles. Driving home I noticed the Montowese exit. This reminded me of driving back from the worst movie ever in Julie's Range Rover, when Alek for some reason decided to pronounce this supposedly native american name as one might pronounce a certain affectione sobriquet for the cash money millionaire lil' wayne. This in turn animated some vestigial feelings of fond resentment and lingering dissapointment that my friends actually wanted to see Wolfgang Peterson's two and a half hour neoclassical rape fantasy over Mean Girls, which, i will grant you, has problems of its own.

I just pulled a Josh.

NYU Colonizing Brooklyn Heights?

New York University is coming to Brooklyn — and so is its voracious appetite for real estate.

The fast-growing private institution, based in Greenwich Village, is opening its first non-Manhattan residence in a Brooklyn Heights apartment tower, and is negotiating what it described as a “merger” with Downtown Brooklyn-based Polytechnic University.

The Brooklyn Paper has learned that 115 graduate students plan to move this month into the “sliver building” at 67 Livingston St., between Clinton and Court streets. The building was formerly used as a residence hall by the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society.

The dormitory news follows a statement by NYU earlier this week that it is negotiation a merger with Downtown Brooklyn–based Polytechnic University.

NYU spokesman John Beckman said in a written statement that his school has been “looking across to Brooklyn to spread the tentacles of its ever growing physical campus.”

Is this a joke? Did Beckman actually say "tentacles?"

A Tornado Grows In Brooklyn

This morning, a tornado hit my neighborhood and Bay Ridge just to the south of us, and did some serious damage down there. My block was unscathed, but the area most badly hit is only about a mile from my apartment. I had a post up about the tornado drills they used to make me do in elementary school and the disaster that eventually struck my high school on April 4, 1991, which had nothing to do with tornados, but it was off topic, and, while I'd moved away a year before it happened, traumatic enough for folks i grew up with that i thought better of detailing it without justification, so I scrapped it.

The only other time I have been near a tornado was on the 4th of July, 1998, in eastern Montana. I was doing this frustratingly bourgie and colonialist "build a playground on an Indian reservation" thing and we had gone to some town where there were fireworks and loud 70's and 80's rock (i.e. "R.O.C.K. in the U.S.A." We could see the storm coming and we thought we were going to be hit, but then it turned around and went the other way. I think there was a Dairy Queen involved. My otherwise eidetic memory seems to be failing me.

Dentist tomorrow, then CGEU this weekend, and then marathon paper writing, take N.

David Brooks:

"For the past few decades, the White House has been occupied by George, William, George, Ronald, James and Richard. Those pillars are crumbling. Pluralism is here."

You say pluralism, I say nepotism...?

Madness and Civilization

Madness gets slammed by folks for not having the same level of commitment to antiracist politics as the other 2tone bands. They were the only all-white 2tone band, and they were never really down with Rock Against Racism - indeed they never really repudiated the neo-nazi element of their fandom, despite their Prince Buster covers and encomia. We should find that extremely problematic in the context of the political climate of Ska's so-called "second wave." Paul Gilroy certainly does in There Ain't No Black In The Union Jack. This video is certainly "not helping" a la Claudia Merson to TWF and yours truly Summer 2003, in that this is not a particularly critical interrogation of the imagoinary of British colonialism. I'd love to read the salutes and hatstomping and the dead bassist (wtf) as a subtle politics of anti/post/colonial mimicry, but I don't think that reading works or is responsible, acknowledges the silences of the green screen and those beyond it.

Bonus: someone say something about the gender and class politics of the multip,e forms of drag being performed here. (Also, we can just talk about how great this video is.)

Although my favorite may actually be