Wall Street Journal, On Strike?

Wall Street Journal staff across America refused to turn up to work yesterday in protest at rapidly advancing takeover talks between Rupert Murdoch and the paper's owner, Dow Jones.

The protest came as it emerged that Mr Murdoch's News Corp had agreed with Dow Jones on a special committee that would be responsible for the hiring and firing of key editors at the Journal and the company's other news businesses.

and a wildcat, at that.

Edit:

May not have actually been a wildcat strike, since the contract expired in january. Negotiations were still happening through June, so it's unclear to me, from what little i've read, whether the contract was being extended and a no strike clause was in effect at the time of the action. The walkout lasted only a few hours and was clearly aimed at embarassing both Dow Jones and Rupert Murdoch, which, judging from the press the action has received, seems to have worked. Here's the "statement" of newspaper guild local leadership.

ramble on?

It's not that I never wanted to move again. My love affair with New York City got complicated sometime towards the end of high school, when i felt like, if New York hadn't exactly exhausted its possibilities for me (anyone claiming that is a lying arrogant fool) there were things i needed to learn outside of New Yoirk, other cities I needed to live in and learn about. And I liked living in New Haven and Boston. I liked walking the streets of San Francisco and Chicago and Tucson and D.F. etc etc. There's an arrogance to New York, too, a "There is No Outside" much less justified and much more empirically false than the claim Hardt and Negri make about capitalism and empire. I don't like it. I love New York, but i'm not sure i need it. And i don't always think it loves me back. Which is to say I want to leave someday soonish.

But I like Sunset Park. I like my apartment, which has felt close to a real home, the closest since Bishop Street. Today I looked out into the backyard and there were hundreds of fireflies floating in the dusk. I like the guys at Charlie's Pizza down on 49th street who stared in dismay at the flatscreen TV as Jorge Posada threw a ball into the outfield (didn't even look like he was aiming for third) i like the park and the middle aged chinese couples practicing waltzes by the pool. I like my walk up fifth avenue and across the bridge. I like my room, my ceiling fan, my windows. I like living half a block from the subway and i like walking ten, fifteen miles a day sometimes, when i feel like it and when work permits. I like sitting on the stoop and watching the world pass by. Hopefully I can stay around here.

I also don't like to move. I like to set down roots and spread outward. I like to accumulate clutter.

Maybe New York is trying to tell me something.

I Ain't Got No Home In This World Anymore?

For the last two years, I've been renting the top floor of a brownstone in Sunset Park with one other person. The bottom two floors are occupied by the owner/landlords, a professional couple with a year and a half old baby boy. Today my landlords told me and my roomate that he wants to offer us a six month lease, after which they want to take posession of the floor again because they want to have a second child. I like living here and I don't want to move. I'm inclined to take the extension, if only because it lets me procrastinate, and i'm good at that, and there's always the possibility of moving in with the parents for a while and living rent free, though i don't know how productive i'd be. The rhyme is unintentional. But I'm worried about having to move in the middle of exam prep, particularly because I've accumulated enough furniture and commodities which i'd be unable to fit in my parents' place, and my lack of a drivers' license makes moving more complicated - damn NYC upbringing. Plus, something tells me I'm more likely to find friends or cool people looking for places to live in a neighborhood i want to live in in July than I am in January or February.

Anyone have any suggestions?

also, in the department of reactionary activist judiciaries, bad and also bad.

God forbid Yale should do anything kitschy with the Macchu Picchu relics Hiram Bingham may or may not have stolen - like, I don't know, parade the New Haven elite past a pair of confused Llamas for "authenticity's" sake?

In the spring of 2003, workers at the Congress Hotel on Michigan Ave in Chicago, Illinois, went on strike because the hotel owner decided to unilaterally impose a staggering 7% wage cut and slash health insurance coverage and other benefits.

When i was in Chicago that July for an organizing training, the workers were still on strike, and I spent some time on the picket line (and learned a lot of chants. My favorite was "Escucha, escucha, estamos en la lucha.")

That was four years ago. Those workers are still on strike. You can read about their struggle here. There was an action to commemorate the anniversary last week, and i'm told it went well.

Four years is a long time. But then, so is six years.

"One day longer..."

NYU's plan for managing 13% growth in enrollment without further swarming the village apparently involves farming off thousands of students each semester to satellite colonies like the recently purchased island in the Seine. Among that 6 million square foot increase is supposed to be a new space for my department, which i will believe when I see and still won't alieviate so much of what has made the last two years so difficult.

I like cover bands in small apartments.

off topic for this blog, perhaps, but nonetheless worth circulating. There have been many nirvana covers over the sixteen years since Nevermind. Tori Amos. Weird Al. That ska band on Moon who covered "Breed" and whose name I am forgetting, because I am old. They were an easy band to cover because the instrumentation is so straightforward, so simple, albeit sometimes sloppy. I never really liked any of these covers. And I never really liked "Smells Like Teen Spirit" that much. Well, that's a lie, but I liked the more lyrical stuff from later on the album more, "Lithium" and "Drain You," and "Lounge Act."

I shouldn't have been as surprised as I was by how great Patti Smith's cover of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" is, but I am. It's probably the best Nirvana cover I've ever heard. Kurt Cobain always said the song was a Pixies rip off, but if the original looked towards "Wave of Mutilation," Smith's cover looks more towards "Silver," i suppose. At any rate, i like it a lot.

Dear NYT,

Since when does property defacement constitute "assault?"

Thank you.

this is the first time i have ever been abloe to hear "buy me a soda" as "buy me a soda"

Total non sequitur, but Kim Deal merits greater attention from this blog.

I went to the corner store yesterday to get a hot chocolate (shut up) and there was a gray kitten sitting on the stack of New York Posts, licking itself, its limbs occasionally flailing about so as to land on the adjacent sunday Times. This would make a cute lolcats, I though to myself, and then I realized i really need to get out more.

This sense of perpetual confinement to my laptop, even when i'm unproductive, is what i hate most about graduate school, this loneliness and dread which are really much to trivial to merit any complaint that doesn't come off as profoundly bourgeois, in a lament of the overprivileged/white man's burden sort of way.

In any event I used to be much better at this whole self motivation thing, when mutual respect and charitable relations came only from below and I somehow managed to read three to five books a week in between committee meetings and organizing conversations and the rest of life. Which begs the question, have i been sniffing glue in my sleep? Eating lead paint in my pasta? What, in the words of Veronica Sawyer, is my damage?

I went for a walk today for the first time in a while, saw my high school girlfriend's best friend across fifth avenue up in the slope but doidn't call out. Not sure why i didn't. There was a street fair that stretched a mile and a half down 7th avenue and on the steps of a church a group of people were singing "I'm Still In Love With You," which, even if you're Rev. Al himself, takes balls. Or ovaries. Or transgender equivalent thereof. I can think of at least three reggae covers of "Here I Am, Come and Take Me," offhand, if we include the crappy and barely qualifiable as reggae UB40 excrescence. Irma Thomas is awesome. In this land of strangers, there are dangers. My guitar sits across the room unstrummed. Jenny Reardon's Race to the Finish awaits. I am thinking about the intro to Moanin' - the Mingus tune not the better known Art Blakey composition. iTunes shuffle conjures up Sleater-Kinney's "Leave You Behind" from the album that made me love them, and that seems a good a place as any to end this entry and get back to work before the ADD renders this screed completely incomprehensible.

I wonder how you looked the day you were erased

Ferrets For Freedom

This is kind of awesome, but it doesn't convey the ferocity of Giuliani's response as the broadcast continued, nor the many other reasons why Giuliani's candidacy is deeply problematic (think Patrick Dorismond.)

Bill Moyers recently interviewed Grace Lee Boggs, the Brynn Mawr Philosophy PhD, Detroit radical, and compatriot of CLR James. At the close of the interview, Moyers asks GLB if she sees any contemporary leaders who are recognizing the limits of the political and embracing what GLB calls a moral and spiritual evolution and what anarchists call dual power. I am interested in Boggs' reply.

I think we have to rethink the concept of "leader." 'Cause "leader" implies "follower." ...I think we need to appropriate, embrace the idea that we are the leaders we've been looking for.

There are echoes here of the Wobblies at Everett, minus the suicidal solidarity of strikers surrounded at gunpoint by an army of scabs. But what interests me about this sentiment is thew way it seems ot go beyond the failures and gaps of dual power and embody an (egalitarian) ethic of organizing both in addition to and beyond the dropout politics of removing oneself from capitalism in order to construct alternatives to it (i.e., dual power.) "We are all leaders" presumably doesn't only mean "we lead ourselves," but also "we lead each other." Bring it.

Pete Rothberg at thenation.com calls the Employee Free Choice Act "redress for Taft-Hartley." If only this were the case. While the EFCA may make it easier for workers to decide whether they want to form unions, it does not even pretend to restore any of the tools and tactics that the act stripped. A numerical boost is a good thing, but it isn't necessarily enough to shift power relations between workers and bosses - though sometimes it can be, if deployed strategically. Which is to say that how much "redress," if any, the EFCA could provide if passed depends entirely on how far people are willing to push the envelope.

It's simply not true that Veronica Mars was consistently brilliant. Season one was engaging and engrossing and at times as good as anything else on TV, but season 2 was annoying and badly plotted, the final episode shocker was insulting and deeply problematic, and season 3 was similarly lame on both political and aesthetic grounds (which is not to suggest that the two are mutually independent or separable.) Rob Thomas was all too happy to let noir be a synonym for the male gaze, and the show's treatment of rape and sexual violence got progressively worse with each passing season. Supporting characters vanished into the ether, and plotlines became increasingly vapid, predictable, or pulled out of the writers' asses for lack of more compelling stories to tell. The "LoVe" story between Veronica and her borderline psychotic spoiled brat of a sometimes lover Logan Echols went from complicated, precarious, and smartly written, to lazy, faux-epic, and trite. So I'd be much more disturbed about the cancellation if the show I liked hadn't, for all intents and purposes, ended two years ago. One reads complaints on the internets about how the CW is replacing VM with a show starring the guy who played Oliver in what was certainly the worst story arc of the OC, but if season 4 was going to be of the same quality as seasons 2 and 3, I'm not sure it would have been worth making anyway. Thank god for The Wire.

Like Claudia Merson once said, "you're not helping."

This is a strong argument against charges made by critics of the Change To Win folks who see broad organizing strategy and structure as always antidemocratic and advocate for smaller scale autonomous unions. This also smacks of craft unionism, and, of course, gross incompetence. When your best shot is for another union to raid your shop, something's seriously wrong.

I was thinking about taking a break from the writing to head up to the free Booker T and the MG's/Sharon Jones show at Chambers Street and the Hudson river, which is also near where my grandparents live these days, but it was raining, and I stayed home instead. I'll pretend that the MGs didn't include Steve Cropper or Donald "Duck" Dunn as a not particularly effective means of consoling myself.

Postscript: Liminality Was So 2004 and Praeteritio, Furtim

I'm agnostic about the value of blogging at the moment, and I stand by this as a clearly articulated, if hastily written and sometimes poorly worded summation of much of what this blog has been/was. The tense confusion in the previous sentence evinces my ambivalence about resuming blogging, and I don't know that I will any time soon, but at the moment it is 1 in the morning, I have recently completed a paper on academic labor and intellectual formation, I learned recently that I'm TAing a large intro lecture next semester, a hole fell out of my tooth a couple weeks ago, and this showed up in my inbox today.



So I return here, not to offer not-particularly intelligent exposition on the recent ICE terror campaign against New Haven, or that "heartless hospital"'s never ending spiral of lies, harassment, and fear. Nor will i subject you to another legnthy reading of Buffy and the neoliberal university. I'll even spare you my take on Aaron Sorkin and white liberal masculinity, particularly as read in and through the incredibly crappy Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. (What? Kidnapping? Someone call Leo McGarry, wrong show be damned!) I won't talk (much) about family health crises and why an episode of Grey's Anatomy made me start spontaneously bawling a few weeks back. Nor will i ask you decide whether the Taste of Honey "Rescue Me" riff sampled by the Funky 4+1 on "The Joint" is better in its original disco form or more well known Sugar Hill incarnation.

I won't subject you to my constant inner monologue on NYU and my attempts to figure out how to reinvest myself in activism and organizing after last year's banal frustrations. And I don't want to get too emo and complainy about New York/aporia. Suffice to say that while we are taught to value the transverse and the rootlessly cosmopolitan, the migrant and the precarious - and rightly so, as sites of radical potential and transformative politics, I do not believe that yearnings for community are necessarily reactionary or recidivist. The fact that solidarity's contingent and imperiled doesn't make it any less valuable. I'm going to sleep now. Oh, Richard Levin will not be the next president of the world bank, so someone should warn Bud Selig. One has to wonder whether he was asked and said no, or whether someone thought Zoellick would be a more attractive candidate because he's less personally connected to the president. But Levin still gets that $42,000 a month pension as of next year, and 1800 hospital workers are still fighting for union recognition, and the world bank will continue to be the same baleful agent of privation, inequality and neoliberal fiscal disciplinarity. Woohoo. I'm going to sleep.