Yale has organized a "boot camp" for graduate students writing their dissertations. This suggests to me a militarization of labor discipline, speed-up in which surveillance is not only ever more integrated and obviously integrated, but constructed as desired, as useful. But the manner in which the event is framed - granting to those poor abject PhD's the amenities afforded to Yale undergrads living in the residential colleges, suggests the national project of infantilizing adult graduate employees, which is central to the post-Brown Decision project of rendering us primarily students, perpetual "trainees" - unless cast into the role of the post-Yeshiva (powerless) "managerial" professoriate. Graduate students suffer because they have been exiled from the uterine comfort of the dormitory. (Possibly because they have been illegally evicted from their graduate dorm, but let's not go there at the moment.) The graduate student as ADD-afflicted procrastinator who cannot complete work and therefore must be subjected to administrative speed-ups and streamlines seems a particular potent formation in the ideological topography of neoliberal academe, producing an ideal terrain for interventions such as this boot camp, however benignly intended, the 2-4 project in the Yale GSAS, and similar initiatives elsewhere, to be certain...

I was writing a post speculating on why Vin Petrini has stayed at his job for the last three years, what makes someone want to do what he does, and then I got bored and realized I didn'tget nearly as much work done tonight as i had intended. So i reread some Cedric Robinson, and i understand better than i did last year why Black Marxism has become such a canonical text for so many in my field, despite my own issues with it, and i guess that's a good thing to be able to do. In class today my professor, acting as an interlocutor for one of her professors when she was a graduate student, which makes this possibly my most mediated blog entry ever (prove me wrong) emphasized the need to "say yes" to the text before saying no, to understandi a text's project and internal logic before tearing it to shreds, as graduate seminars are wont to do. I think that's good pedagogy, although I'm not convinced anymore that I know what good pedagogy is in a non-empirical sense. I know it when I see it. And i can point to Freire, etc. But Freire is not the be all end all of good teaching. I'm rambling again. It's bed time.

I downloaded four cds today. Haven't had the chance to listen to them all yet, but feel obsessively-compulsively drawn to blog about the ones i have listened to. Peter Bjorn and John's Writer's Block is at this juncture probably the one i like the most. At its best, it sometimes feels like the best album the Go-Betweens never made. The New Deerhoof album, Friend Opportunity pretty much picks up where The Runners Four ended, at least musically. Lyrically, I think it's a little less sanguine and explosive, a bit more rueful. But I may be pulling that out of my ass. I haven't listened to The Long Blondes' "someone to drive you home" enough to form an opinion yet, but I'm underwhelmed by Menomena's Friend and Foe.

Back to Black Marxism.

From the previews, it looks like Veronica Mars is going to jump the shark for good next week. Oh well.

I've been very unproductive today. I think it's propter nivem, as my 8th grade Latin teacher olim dixit. It has to end. In part I'm excited about buying a new computer, now that Vista is out, to replace the one that died over the summer (the one I'm typing on now is on loan from mis padres. It's tiny and "ultra portable" in the language of computer-purchasing, which is cool, but there's lots of stuff it can't really do.) And I'm a little burnt out from the last week of crazy meetings and visiting friends et cetera. By the way, the "c" is hard. Like a building occupation. Just kidding.

The work i have managed to get done so far has been some reading for class, and some research for an incomplete paper, though not as much as I would have liked. I also slowly finished season 2 of The Wire, which is the most nuanced and compelling depiction of union corruption I've ever seen, ludicrous NOI assassin caricatures notwithstanding. And today I took a walk, thought about New York and the racialized geographies of southern Brooklyn and discovered the Tasti-D-Lite on 86th street in Bay Ridge. And I paid my cable bill and my electricity and my credit cad bill, which was pretty swollen from coursebooks and the impulse buys on amazon I made too many of while writing my Postcolonial Marxism paper over break. I kind of like not having class on Mondays this semester, but I can see it too easily becoming too seductive as far as procrastination's concerned. Speaking of which, this is a useless entry, and I have better things i should be doing right now. So if you want to read today's attempt at a substantial entry go here if you haven't already. Otherwise, don't tell me anything about season's three or four of The Wire, because I'm going to hold off on watching them until the end of the semester.

But while I'm rambling, here are bizarre search hits which have led folks to this humble blog:
industrial age progressive companies pro-labor
The UFW movimiento clap
SODEXHO INTERNET NYUS
president giamatti on "phil donahue" yale
police sirens whoop new york
dov charney has issues

Reflections on Recent iTunes Celebrity Playlists

1. Someone needs to Tell Thom Yorke that Madlib and Quasimoto are the same person, hence referring to "Madvillain and Quasimoto" is redundant since the "mad" half of madvillain and Quasimoto are the same individual.

2. Diana Ross picks only Diana Ross tunes, which is lame in itself, but she only picks one Supremes song and includes her rather weak version of "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" when everyone knows Tami Terelle and Marvin Gaye owned that song, even the people responsible for Stepmom.

3.TV on the Radio include my favorite Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings song, which is cool.

4. Sylvester Stallone claims that "Born on the Bayou" "transports" him to "the swamps of Louisiana," but the song was written by someone from Northern California who had never even been to Louisiana. Discuss.

5. Liz Phair. What the fuck. Jefferson Starship. Sister Hazel? THE DAVE FUCKING MATTHEWS BAND? Huh?

The House Of Delegates, Gonad Metaphors, and Academic Capitalism

During a very long action-planning meeting during the second Yale strike of 2003, a fierce debate erupted over whether, as some termed it, to plan a "hard" building occupation (barricades, a la Columbia 1968) or a "soft" one (more of a sit-in, not resisting police, etc.) My response to this then was to note that a building occupation is not a penis, and that it becomes problematic to speak of direct action as "hard or soft" both in gendered terms, and from the standpoint of sometimes fetishizing the tactic at the expense of strategy.

Carrying on the dubious phallus metaphor, however, to one WSN columnist who has long opposed GSOC, the Graduate House of Delegates, NYU's new company union on which I and some 34 or so other GSOC supporters sit and hold a supermajority, apparently, is a testicle. Which makes GSOC an evil veterinarian or something, i suppose.

Moskowitz accuses GSOC of having verbally sabotaged the HOD and suggests that our only goal is a union contract and we will thus not take seriously the opportunity the HOD provides. My response to this is threefold: first, it is the NYU administration , not GSOC, which is currently responsible for the skepticism most graduate students , whether or not we support GSOC, (which most of us have time and again demonstrated that we do) hold for the HOD. As its constitution is currently written, the HOD's ability to improve working conditions and protect graduate employees is risible. There was never an up or down vote on whether or not we wanted a house of delegates or an "assembly of graduate assistants", instead these was crammed down our throats by the administration and its well-compensated agents. Indeed, when given the opportunity to speak, GA's in GSOC's bargaining unit have repeatedly voiced majority support for the university to negotiate a new contract with the union. If there has been any sabotaging of the HOD, it's come from the sordid and cynical history of its establishment and the bankruptcy of its constitution as currently written.

As both a GSOC member and an HOD delegate, I am committed to seeing the HOD through, pushing the mechanism as far as possible to meet the demands of graduate employees on this campus. The HOD won't be "useless," for me, at least, until such a time as it has been proven completely incapable of doing so. I see the HOD not as a threat, but as a tool.

The second half of Moskowitz's piece concerns itself with whether or not the university is a democracy, with a putative difference but interdependence between "wealth production" and "knowledge production." We pay money to the university so we can enjoy pure knwoeldge, pure culture. The difference between "wealth production" and "knowledge production," then, makes the university an idealized space of Arnoldian cultural production, into which movements for participatory democracy and radical reconfiguration represent an unwanted, intrusive outside. The interdependence between the two rationalizes and seeks to render normative academic neoliberalism and the Enterprise University's logics of real estate speculation, capital accumulation, and the bottom line. But this supposed difference is specious and arbitrary. Knowledge production is wealth production these days, as Moskowitz would understand if he ever stepped into an immunobiology laboratory. And thus this supposed interdependence relies on reified and useless categories and is woefully incomplete, failing to yield any accurate picture of the ways in which knowledge production has long since been a capitalist enterprise.

It is this neoliberal morphology of capital "penetration" (there go those genital metaphors again!) which the academic labor movement is uniquely poised to transform. Put succinctly, this is why we need a union.

Marna Borgstrom ditches the New Haven Board of aldermen, and the UOC demands card check, which, granted, isn't exactly radical at this juncture since DeStefano did so two months ago, but neither does it necessarily have to be to apply pressure where needed and is still, a good development to offset Marna "I wrote my M.P.H. Thesis on Union Busting" Borgstrom's refusal to be held accountable.

Amid the battle, an old master's thesis has surfaced that has union leaders wondering if Borgstrom ever intended to give them a fair shake. As a graduate student at Yale, Borgstrom spent one summer at a hospital in San Jose, Calif., helping to break the union there. She wrote up her findings in a 1979 thesis that was discovered this week in a Yale library.

In Borgstrom's study, an employee sick of paying union dues schemed with management to decertify the union. Managers ousted one of their own to placate workers. They also implemented "Operation Speak-Easy" to listen to employee complaints while monitoring union support. In the end, the union fell. "The Hospital should strive for union-free status," her thesis concludes.

It snowed a lot in Sunset Park last night, so much so i could hardly sleep because snow makes me all giddy. So now I'm going to go out and walk around a but before it all melts, and try to forget two of the three long, long meetings of the past week.

I haven't made it to Other Music in a while, and I've been pretty swamped. So i can give no insight into the new Shins album (objectivist or just misanthropic) or the menomena album. Also, I need to buy a new computer next weekish and am trying not to spend money on hipster music I will probably not enjoy but would only buy to achieve a certain cultural literacy in a genre i am not sure i give a fuck about (maybe bittorrent is the way to go here.) I do want to hear the new Deerhoof, but i probably won't for a while. Tonight after the insanely long five hour GSOC meeting, though, I did manage to listen to James Brown's Funky People Part 3, which, while it lacks the highly sampled tracks of the first two comps - "Pass The Peas," "I Know You Got Soul," etc., is just as good. Check it out.

Coming soon, hopefully, once I get some sleep (I've had almost none in the last two days):

• An in depth response to the anti-GSOC column in today's WSN
• Something else I've since forgotten

For now I give you first humor and then outrage.

Humor:

"I want to get to the fetish, obviously." - Marxist Historian, Capitalism and History seminar today.

Outrage:

On Wednesday, January 24, Immigration and Customs Enforcement Officers(ICE) arrested 21 Smithfield workers from the Tar Heel plant. The arrests come on the heels of the company announcement that it will fire up to 600 people next month primarily those who walked out in protest last November over the firings of fellow employees allegedly for receiving social security no match letters. This is yet another attempt on the part of Smithfield to terrorize the workers who have been struggling for a collective voice on the job for over a decade. As we speak, families are torn apart; children coming home from school do not know where their parents are and workers are afraid to show up to work. Today, the day after the arrests, Smithfield's production was cut in half as workers did not report to work, fearing they would be next.

The arrests may very well be in violation of ICE's own guidelines which prohibit ICE from facilitating the use of immigration laws of enforcement to intervene in a labor dispute.

The UFCW is supporting the establishment of a humanitarian fund to assist workers and their families who are unfairly terminated.

For more information on the arrests and the November walkout, please check out:

Fell asleep reading. Had a strange dream involving Grove Street in New Haven, a non-existent bus station, Josh, one of my high school ethics teachers, and Dee-Lite of "Groove is in the House" fame.

I've been thinking about deleting this blog and starting over, but I'm far too much the pack rat to do it right now.

During second semester of sophomore year of college i took the comp lit department's intro to lit theory class. I hated the professor, the course's methodology, and most of the readings until, late in the semester, we made it to the marxists, the feminists, deconstruction, and the postcolonialists. During the week on the New Critics when i tried to make a point about the social and historical context of the denial of referent beyond the text, (and I'll admit to not having done the reading, too busy wallowing in depression and waiting for the revolution) my TA ended the class by gesturing at me and declaring "and here we have our Marxist." This, combined with the anti-union (all four of them) professor's narcissistic posturing at the lectern about whether or not he was a Marxist led me to attend sections and lectures even less, but vituperative pedagogy isn't really my point here - what is is the being fingered as "the Marxist," however inaccurate such a designation may actually be for my particular political and theoretical commitments. Come to think of it, we could include my 1oth grade history teacher's somewhat condescending but fondly exasperated statement to me that it was good to have the voice of Marx in the classroom, to which I, with mild indignation, responded, "But I'm an Anarchist!" (Saw her last year while standing on the picket line.)

I felt that peculiar discomfort about being interpolated within a particular discursive construction of "the Marxist" which seems inadequate, innacurate, and insufficient given the actual scope of Marxian interventions in Cultural Studies in class yesterday evening during a discussion of Wallerstein on World-Systems and Michael Denning's 1986 essay on "The Special American Conditions" and American Studies's history as a substitute for Marxism. Maybe I myself was being a bit narcissistic, and the politics and circumstances of the two classes and groups of folks involved were very different, thank jeebus. But there were offhanded comments in the hallway during the break, and I had a more general discomfort with the collapsing of
New Left-influenced marxist cultural studies with big M Marxist political theory methodological
orthodoxy. I certainly wasn't the only person in the room for whom Marxist cultural theory is important or useful. Maybe what I'm frustrated with is the ease with which folks who drift towards poststructuralist interventions sometimes make their break with Marx in ways that strike me as counterproductive and dependent upon extremely limited and limiting readings of Marxists and Marxism. This was especially infuriating in the Postcolonial Marxism class I took last semester. This is coming out way more polemical and less sensical than I intended it.

I'm still not willing to call myself a Marxist, whatever my investments in certain moments of Marxist cultural theory. I have huge problems with Marx and many other figures in the tradition. I have similar reservations about anarchist interventions from Proudhon and Bakunin forward. But even as Marxist descriptions of "faddish" poststructuralisms and postmodernisms and postcolonialism have always made me cringe, so do the totalizing oversimplifications with which some dismiss more recent reconfigurations of Marxian frameworks. Maybe I'm just not cracked up for this academic thing.

It's six in the morning and I woke up to reread George Fredrickson's Racism: A Short History, which I had tons of issues with four years ago, most of which are not dispelled by another go-round.

Woke up fromw ierd dream about people i sort of knew in college and couldn't get Nickelback's execrable "This is how you remind me" out of my head. Torture.

In other campus-media related program activities, after a year in which the WSN's anti-union editorials and anti-union staff columnists who happened to also be WSN editors frequently bled together (and I don't think the news coverage was by any means unscathed,) the new editorial board promises to change by creating a separate editorial board for the purposes of crafting staff editorials.

Until now, the editorial board of this paper was composed of the senior staff - the editor-in-chief, managing editor, desk editors and chiefs of production and copy. This system had an inherent ethical conflict: All of these positions, with the exception of opinion editor, include a responsibility to strive toward unbiased content. The job of the editorial board, of course, is to hold nightly discussions of issues, which inspire staff editorials. The staff editorial, one hopes, is never unbiased.

While we acknowledge that, to a certain extent, bias is impossible to eradicate from a newspaper, it is inappropriate for editors to publicly voice their opinions on issues they otherwise cover objectively. Furthermore, the editorial has at times been accused of masquerading as the voice of the NYU student body, when it was nothing more than the jaded view of snobby student journalists. This is perhaps a fair criticism, and we are reaching out to the community now to reverse this image.

It remains to be seen what kind of effect this will have. Hopefully, the WSN can become a better paper less beholden to the neoliberal and overprivileged opinions of some of its editorial staff, who will hopefully stop simultaneously writing news stories, opinion columns and staff editorials. I have to wonder, though why editors chose to describe in today's article graduate teachers' and researchers' overwhelming support for the union in last month's Graduate House Of Delegates election as an outside institution "dominating" a body whose legitimacy will always be in peril?

Also, NYU students have introduced to the administration a proposal for reform to the university's housing policies to reverse discrimination on the basis of gender identity and combat NYU Housing's transphobia, heteronormativity and sexism. Click on the links for more information.

I wrote a long post this morning about the HOD and the WSN's parroting of administration rhetoric ("only 2,000 out of the 19,000 graduate students") and similar ridiculousness in the YDN, which accepts at face value that Yale administration's claim that it's Bob Proto's fault that Yale won't push the hospital more (and not simply that Yale administrators have no desire to get behind DeStefano's call for card check neutrality when they themselves have waged such a long anti-union campaign in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.)

I lost the post because my computer doesn't have any ram and my browser froze. But I thought you'd want to know it existed anyway. It even had a snappy title which referenced Give 'Em Enough Rope and the redesigns of both papers' websites. I really hate it when this happens.

watching pbs and just noticed that Stokely Carmichael, as he outlines for a TV reporter the basis of black power during his mobile debate with King during the James Meredith March, is wearing an 1199 hat.

I wouldn't have been surprised if King had been wearing the hat - he had a warm relationship with the union and often supported them. The union's antiracist, anti-imperialist organizing among black and puerto rican NYC hospital workers from the 50's on even attracted Malcolm X's support and admiration. The only labor rally Malcolm ever spoke at was an 1199 rally but that statistic belies a deeper and more important series of connections between 1199 and transnational black radicalisms.

Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Toure) was born in Trinidad but grew up in N.Y. (went to Bronx Science) during the height of 1199's radical ferment, so his support for the union makes a great deal of sense, aprticularly given their support for the kinds of radical nationalist projects Carmichael sought to build and nurture. But it's still notable, because this was in Mississippi, and this was Stokely Carmichael.

A year ago today, I posted an excerpt from the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter From a Birmingham Jail" in part because the denunciations of comprador white liberalism resonated with certain objective conditions of the NYU strike which need not be explicated further now. Today I turn instead to Dr King's speech to striking Memphis sanitation workers on April 3, 1968, the day before he was assassinated, but first I want to direct your attention to today's Democracy Now broadcast, which features conversations with one of the union members and severasl community organizers and is very interesting, particularly in relation to California Newsreel's At The River I Stand. Below is excerpted what strikes me as one of the more visionary and poetic moments of the "I've been to the mountaintop" speech mentioned above, demonstrating the forms of solidarity and connection King envisioned and was making by the late 1960s.

Strangely enough, I would turn to the Almighty and say "if you allow me to live just a few years in the second half of the twentieth century, I will be happy.

Now that's a strange statement to make, because the world is all messed up. The nation is sick, trouble is in the land. confusion all around. That's a strange statement. But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough can you see the stars. And i see god working in this period of the twentieth century in a way that men in some strange way are responding. Something is happening in our world. The masses are rising up. And wherever they are assembled today, whether they are in Johannesburg, South Africa; Nairobi, Kenya; Accra, Ghana; New York City; Atlanta, Georgia; Jackson, Mississippi; or Memphis, Tenessee, the cry is always the same: "We want to be free."

It's twenty minutes before four a.m., and I'm headed towards my bed (about eighteen inches from where I'm currently sitting.) I should have gone to sleep hours ago, but after I got home from visiting the parents and the little brother, I was unable to refrain from watching the final two episodes of the first season of the wire, about which I have conflicting feelings. It's well written, it deals with the social production of criminality in a far more complex manner thany any cop show I've ever seen, and at times goes to great legnths to make it clear that the cops are not necessarily the good guys or result to simple pathologies about drug culture and ghetto criminality and the genre's well-worn (racist) tropes of psychotic or menacing black villainy. But at times it slips up, too caught up in the righteousness or moral failings of its own dramatis personae, or the seductive aesthetics of blood splatters and bullet wounds on naked sixteen-year old flesh. I hear later seasons are better. Maybe someday I'll have time to watch them.

My goals for the coming year, in case you were wondering, are to figure out how to be an academic in a way that won't make me sick to my stomach, and how to get work done and produce academic work i'm not ashamed of and within a reasonable time period. I want to help build a new future for academic workers at NYU and everywhere else. I want to make our struggle part of larger struggles for social justice in ways that aren't meaningless ISO bullet points or shallow Social Democrat platitudes. I want to level a blood elf mage to 70. I want to figure out how to be in a relationship for longer than two weeks again (If the preceeding sentence did not foreclose any such possibility from the get-go), which, I supsect, will involve me learning to trust myself and other people to a far greater degree than I did last year
. I want to read good books and write good papers and finish my first exam. I want to get a phone call from Phoebe informing me that YNHH workers have won recognition via a card check, but that's out of my hands at the moment. But mostly I want to work through all the shit that was so difficult this past year and figure out how to move forward. Getting my registration out of library-mandated arrears will be a good first step. Finishing the incompletes is similarly something I should have done a long time ago but keep getting stalled by fear and frustration. And thoughts about the union deserve more than to be shunted off to the end of this logorrheaic psychobabble, but I hope that this blog will return to foregrounding those issues rather than crappy music blogging, the aimless diary-style of a twelve year old mind trapped in a twenty-five year old's hairy-backed frame, or half formed and sometimes ill-informed angsty rants about shit I probably shouldn't be writing about. Bedtime.

Edit: I really need to stop blogging at 2 in the morning. The opening song was "Black and White," not "Black or White," which is by Michael Jackson and involved the King of Pop morphing into a pathera pardus and smashing a car with a crowbar. And half my sentences don't make any sense.

I saw the dB's tonight, for the first time and after two years of obsession with the band's first two albums. I was going to go to the show with JL, who is my concert buddy and has been my only concert buddy since senior year of college with the exception of the Alek-Julie-me exodus to the 4/26/2004 Irving Plaza Sleater-Kinney show, missing the Federation rally to my great chagrin but getting in retunr an extremely Hot Rock, Call The Doctor, and One Beat-heavy set, and a couple of shows - the Wowz, Siren, The Go! Team, MIA, that I went to alone. Unfortunately the dB's sold out today at the last minute, so I was on my own.

I suspect that I was in the lowest one or two percentile agewise in relation to the crowd, many of whom had very grey hair - or very little hair - and wrinkly faces. There was a row of ridiculously tall men in leather jackets standing in front of me, and that was a bit lame. There was also a recurring flatulent odor which was not very fun to soak in.

That said, shows at the Bowery Ballroom are always fun because the venue has fantastic acoustics. (I saw Sufjan Stevens there last year.) The dB's set started out explosively, with a bombastic rendition of "Black and White," then turned to "Dynamite," with it's awesome synth-organ parts, and "Big Brown Eyes" sans Hubley animation. "Living a Lie" and "Neverland" were both incredible, as was "Happenstance" and "Cycles per second." Unfortunately no "Bad Reputation" or "The Fight" but the musicianship was impeccable and people-watching the 50 year old former hipsters was pretty amazing. Also the guy standing next to me looked like Ira Kaplan.

Finally heard Game Theory, and Alek was right, it's great - maybe my favorite Roots album, and since they have six and the critical consensus seems to be that everything after was a step backward, i guess that's saying a lot. The only letdown is the dissapointingly cheesy J-Dilla tribute at the end, although "Atonement," the penultimate track is a bit too ballady and boring. The rest is impressive and unexpected, joining Yo La Tengo in the club of bands I thought were done but wound up putting out some of the best stuff of their careers this year.

Last Night, a DJ Saved My Life From a Broken Heart.

The title was just to get your attention. I spent last night sitting in my apartment reading. I totally didn't realize there was a rap (or at least spoken) interlude on that song. I bought this shitty used funk/soul comp a Other music which has way more disco than anything else, including the song from the Freaks and Geeks episode (Discos and Dragons) where Jason Segal's character (that would be Nick Andopolous) participates in the disco competition, and, like, Cameo. It also has Isaac Hayes's "Theme From Shaft," Cheryl Lynn's "Got To Be Real," and Rockwell ft Jacko, "Somebody's Watching Me" (Rockwell's verses on which now remind me of Boots Riley's affected voice on "We Are The Ones.") Rakim and Billy Griffin have the same name. Discuss. Speaking of Rakim, The JB's "Pass The Peas" and Bobby Bird's "I Know You Got Soul" are both great songs (You can find them on the James Brown's Funky People comps, parts 1 and 2 respectively,) but I prefer the songs that sample them on Paid In Full ("Pass The Peas" provides the great horn sample in "I Ain't No Joke," and Eric B. and Rakim's version of "I Know You Got Soul" got them sued, which is said because it may be the most brilliant hip hop recording ever.)

There was snow, or at least ice, on the rooves of the cars outside my window when I woke up this morning, which made me somewhat happy, but then i thought about the fact that this is the warmest winter in NY history, and that scared the bejeezus out of me. Speaking fo the bejeezus, Two mormon missionaries got on the bus at 42nd and 5th (in Brooklyn. I can't remember the last time I was in midtown. Maybe when Julie and I went to the American Girl store to shop for her neice Sofia in November? I don't know.) On the bus were three little kids and their grandmother. One of the kids, a boy who couldn't have been older than four, kept asking people who were getting off at the back doors if they were leaving and then loudly imitated the beeping noise NYC busses make when their doors are opened or they are pulling away from the curb - i'm actually nto sure when and why htey beep and i've lived in this city most of my life.

Spooky has graduated from my custody. I am going to miss her. I said goodbye today and she crawled onto my lap again and kept nudging me with her face.

Turning from Flatbush Avenue on to State Street this afternoon to go feed Spooky I passed a short, stocky, goatteed guy in his late 20s walking in the other direction. He looked at me, said "panda power," and continued walking. Did this man somehow know that I love pandas? Was he mocking my GSOC button, or the fact that, dressed in all black save for the white rubber tips of my converses, I had kind of a panda color scheme going on? Or was he totally fucking batshit? Who cares? It was awesome.

What wasn't awesome was getting locked out of Spooky's apartment because the landlord called the locksmith at the request of spooky's owner, who wanted a different kind of lock on the outside gate leading into the little vestibule where the front door to the 1st floor is, and the locksmith came much earlier than anyone was expecting. It's all resolved now - I have to go pick up a key tomorrow afternoon - but I am already in Spooky withdrawal. I love that cat a lot. SHe is ridiculously affectionate and jumped in my lap while i was watching a tivoed episode of The Tick yesterday. She's adorable.

Bombing Somalia. They're not even particularly good imperialists anymore, are they?

Yesterday Manhattan smelled and people got paranoid.

I have been in Manhattan a total of four times in the last month. That's kind of awesome.

Oh. Mos Def came out with a half-assed new album, which, while not nearly as sexist, homophobic, and anti-semitic as The New Danger Crapfest ft Marky Mark and the Motherfucking Funky Bunch, was boring and haphazard and the best moment was the beat from "Liquid Swords." Geffen released it on Friday, December 29 (which is fucking bizarre since most new cds come out on Tuesdays and December 29 is December 29. Now it's been recalled. Supposedly the rerelease will actually include cover artwork. Maybe Mos could use the extra time and make a halfway decent album which does not cast hip hop as anally raped victim of David Geffen "Homosexuals" and "Israelis." Not that bashing Israelis is necessarily anti-Semitic, but I sincerely doubt that the problem has with Lyor COhen "controlling this rap game" has anything to do with his admittedly vocal (and admirable) support for Palestinian Liberation.

Revolt of the teachers?

Karen Arenson, NYT:

Circumstances vary, but the overthrow of Dr. Summers may have been contagious.

At Case Western, where the prospect of a cumulative three-year deficit of $100 million led to unrest, Lawrence Krauss, a physics and astronomy professor, said that the Harvard episode had shown him how faculty members could take action. “I was emboldened by it,” said Dr. Krauss, who initiated the campaign last February to oust the president, Edward M. Hundert.

The clashes on many of the campuses reflect the increasingly uneasy relationship between those running colleges and those teaching at them, as the institutions grow more complex and the presidents become more like chief executives than stewards of academic life.

A university presidency, once a plum post, has become “a position of extraordinary precariousness,” said Richard P. Chait, a professor of higher education at Harvard. He described the no-confidence votes as signs that faculties and administrators were so much at odds that they were “close to having irreconcilable differences.”

Pharaohe Monch Is a better Michael Moore than Michael Moore

Toys R' Us recants.

72 fahrenheidt and apocalyptic in the sun yesterday. My brother tried to get me to go see "metal ballet" with him, but I begged off and procrastinated at home instead. Spooky scratched me again, the schmuck. I listened to Mastodon's Blood Mountain in lieu of Metal Ballet, and also Joanna Newsom's Ys, which I liked more than I thought I would and more than The Milk-Eyed Mender or whatever the first album was called, although 16 minutes is probably too long for a song if your name is not Miles Davis or Cecil Taylor. That said, it's a shockingly good 16 minute long song, lyrically potent and melodically intriguing despite the fact that i could walk to the post office and back listening only to it. (Actually not true, because the post office is really pretty far from here, and I'd have to stand on line for an hour anyway.)

Alek has provided a visual aid for Walter 3000. It's awesome.

I intended a substantial entry but I've lost the interest, so here's some C.L.R. James:

We say, number one, that the Negro struggle, the independent Negro struggle, has a vitality and a validity of its own; that it has deep historic roots in the past of America and in present struggles; it has an organic political perspective, along which it is travelling, to one degree or another, and everything shows that at the present time it is travelling with great speed and vigour.

We say, number two, that this independent Negro movement is able to intervene with terrific force upon the general social and political life of the nation, despite the fact that it is waged under the banner of democratic rights, and is not led necessarily either by the organised labour movement or the Marxist party.

We say, number three, and this is the most important, that it is able to exercise a powerful influence upon the revolutionary proletariat, that it has got a great contribution to make to the development of the proletariat in the United States, and that it is in itself a constituent part of the struggle for socialism.

In this way we challenge directly any attempt to subordinate or to push to the rear the social and political significance of the independent Negro struggle for democratic rights. That is our position. It was the position of Lenin thirty years ago. It was the position of Trotsky which he fought for during many years. It has been concretised by the general class struggle in the United States, and the tremendous struggles of the Negro people. It has been sharpened and refined by political controversy in our movement, and best of all it has had the benefit of three or four years of practical application in the Negro struggle and in the class struggle by the Socialist Workers’ Party during the past few years.

Modest Mouse, a band I don't like, recently added Johny Marr, formerly of The Smiths, one of my favorite guitarists of all time. This strikes me as patenlty unfair. Sort of like how the Yankees can dump a 38 year old Gary Sheffield on the Detroit Tigers and just like that, pick up Humberto Sanchez for nothing. I hate the Yankees.

Anyway, oitchfrok links to a stream of a new modest mouse song, which is very poppy and in the GNFPWLBN vibe. Nothing particularly interesting other than Marr's guitar work, which is still awesome and may necessitate me listening to or even buying the new record when it comes out just to hear Johnny Marr. Which is unfair, really, because Modest Mouse are extremely boring.

Toys R' Us discriminates against the children of undocumented restaurant workers

The baby girl, Yuki Lin, was an American citizen from the second the ball dropped in Times Square, where the Toys “R” Us flagship store draws thousands of shoppers from around the world. But like 6 out of 10 babies born in the city — including at least two others born in Brooklyn about the same moment — she has immigrant parents. And according to the contest’s fine print, the chain decided, she was ruled out because her mother was not a legal resident.

The first baby of the year is usually a one-day story. But Albert H. Wang, a corporate lawyer who read about Yuki Lin’s lost chance on the Web site of the Chinese-language newspaper The World Journal, was outraged enough to start an e-mail campaign that is enlisting the ire of prominent Chinese-Americans like the president of the Asian American Business Development Center and officers of the Organization of Chinese Americans.

Their criticism, and threats of a media campaign against the company, come just a month after the chain opened its first store in China, in Shanghai.

“They want business from China,” said Mr. Wang, 39, adding that most of the chain’s toys are made by Chinese workers in China. “But when it comes to this Chinese-American U.S. citizen, she was deprived of $25,000 intended to be used for her college education, because of who her parents are.”

Kathleen Waugh, a spokeswoman for the company, confirmed yesterday that Yuki Lin, born at 6.5 pounds and 19 inches long, had been close to winning the prize. The baby won a random drawing to break a three-way tie with hospitals in Gainesville, Ga., and Bay Shore, N.Y., which also claimed a baby born at midnight.

But, Ms. Waugh added, “in working with New York Downtown Hospital to verify the potential winner’s information and obtain a signed affidavit of eligibility — which is required under the official rules of the sweepstakes — the sweepstakes administrator was informed that the mother of the baby born at New York Downtown Hospital was not a legal resident of the United States.” Contest rules say that only mothers who are legal residents are eligible, Ms. Waugh said, adding that such requirements are common in sweepstakes.

The award went instead to the runner-up in the drawing, Jayden Swain, born 19 seconds after midnight at Northeast Georgia Medical Center to Renee Swain, 20, described by her mother as “a black American.” “She’s an American all the way,” Ms. Swain’s mother, Janet K. Keller, said in a telephone interview.

The baby at Bay Shore was born to a couple from El Salvador.

Mr. Wang and other Chinese-Americans say the winner was to be the baby, not the mother, and they see implications of second-class citizenship that strike an ugly chord. It only seemed to add insult to injury, they said, that the baby was instead given a $100 gift basket, just like all the others the chain gives to the first New Year’s babies born in any hospital that signs up for it.

“People are just pretty much outraged,” said John Wang, president of the 13-year-old Asian American Business Development Center, on Wall Street, adding that he was perplexed by the company’s actions.

“The schools accept children whose parents are illegal aliens in this country, so why is Toys ‘R’ Us taking this kind of position?” he asked. “They’re supported by many people, whether they’re legal or illegal, shopping in their stores, and they’re injecting themselves into this debate.”

This is distrubing on many levels. First, the baby in question is of course a U.S. citizen, as is anyone born in this country. The curtailment of a citizen's rights based on the legal status of her parents suggests a two-tiered citizenship structure, in which some are once again less equal than others- not that this is anything new. Pitting any African American baby against the child of undocumented Chinese immigrants is also particularly disturbing. And of course, fundamentally, "no human is illegal:" by claiming that "legal residency" or lack thereof of the baby's parents should define a U.S. citizen's rights, Toys R' Us is not only foreclosing the citizenship rights of the baby but also instantiating the exploitation of the parents. And that's fucked up.

This blog's been besieged recently with google image search hits for "wilford brimley." (In February I noted how GSOCers were frequently commenting on his resemblance to NYU Provost David McLaughlin.)

I have to wonder whence this crazed desire for Wilford Brimley pictures originates? A nostalgic desire for a national past that never existed as depicted in oatmeal commercials? An appreciation of Mr. Brimley's fine acting in such films as Cocoon, The Thing, and The Firm? I don't get it.

Reading back over those contentious comment wars as i scan those february posts, I think about where I was wrong ("the leadership change wasn't pressing," etc.), and where I was right (the most important thing was always organizing, transforming), and how absolutely insane last year was, and how we must learn from it in moving the academic labor movement forward. If I were to post a longer "end of the year post," as I have done in previous years, it would be about that. But I still don't feel comfortable airing all that on a blog, particularly this blog. So I'm not going to do that.

Instead, I'm going to go out for a walk and check on my feline charge, who yesterday spent a good half hour jumping around her apartment chasing around a stuffed mouse.

Just spilled dumpling sauce all over my pants and had to come home and change clothes.

I have no idea why I am writing this on the internet.

Time to go check on the cat.

cat scratch fever

Spooky, the racially-insensitively named black cat for whom I am babysitting until the 11th, has been getting way too comfortable around me. For the most part, this is good, because she gets all affectionate and nuzzles me and jumps up on the couch, and it's really cute. But she also sometimes confuses my hand with her stuffed mouse, grabs me in her claws, and tries to bite me. For a small cat, Spooky has some very sharp claws, and both my hands are now covered in red scratch marks.

I had a strange dream last night involving some sort of dating bazaar and a lot of people i went to high school with and haven't seen in at least six years. I think Phoebe was there too. And someone made a lame joke about workers and capitalism so I said something about striking and dating, and then I woke up.

Year end post. Yeah, sorry about that. It was too detailed in depictions of personal aporia, union frusrations, academic angst. Maybe I'll revise and post. Maybe i won't. It was an insane and difficult year and I hope 2007 turns out much, much better.

Went to Hoboken last night which was cool - new year's came on the path train and a drunk dude in a funny hat shook everyone's hand. all though the train coming home at 5 am had vomit all over it and i stepped in it, which sucked enormously. Also i hurt my ankle.

Never been to Hoboken before. Lots of people lined outside of bars talking about the Jets. Huge lofts and shy cats and somewhere, I'm sure, Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley.

I walked through prospect park yesterday and then down 10th to McDonald down McDonald to Forth Hamilton down Fort Hamilton to the cemetery entrance, and then across greenwood cemetery back to 5th and down 5th home to Sunset Park. The cemetery is beautiful and ancient, mausoleums with ornate masonry and crypts built in rows into hillsides and it was totally quiet and felt like another century except for the odd car that drove by every ten minutes.