Today was rather productive. Ran into a friend from college while on my walk into manhattan, got in two and a half plus hours of solid phonebanking, set up some lab visits, did a class visit, read, fed spooky, watched a little TV.

I also had the second bizarre NYC celebrity sighting in a week. (Last tuesday it was Russell Simmons at VP2, today Aida Turturro aka Janice Soprano outside the NYU dorm on University between Waverly and 8th.) It's such a bizarre existence, trying to live some sort of meaningful life among the walking figments of spectacle. Perhaps is this which makes us all such sarcastic hollow desperate rakes. That sounds profoundly reactionary, doesn't it? And also, incontrovertibly rooted in a certain racial and racist logic of the city in which something like grad school is very much implicated for me, and dreams of flight cannot dislodge or decenter even if my non drivers-license having, ratty passport holding-obligated to teach for two years ass could even figure out a way to realize them. But from here on out i stop complaining about New York in the age of American Apparel and Theory not the abstract noun but the soho boutique and instead i start moving forward. I am relying on you to hold me accountable to that.

And with that, i'll go to sleep.

He's lip-synching, i'm pretty sure.

I also could care less.

This is amazing.

This is why i won't go to therapy

school hazed?

The pilot of Greek ABC Family's summer drama about college fratfolk and their wacky doingds, was a free download on iTunes, and with nothing more promising to do ona saturday evening (i hate grad school) i will admit to having watched it. With the exceptions of A Different World and Felicity, TV shows about higher education seem doomed to fail. Class of '96, Saved By The Bell: The College Years, and Undeclared all illustrate this point, although I think if Apatow had made Undeclared a one hour drama rather than the half hour sitcom it was, it might have been a much better show. College, for some reason, seems to have been more the domain of movies. Animal House, Revenge of the Nerds 1-5, Dead Man on Campus, First Daughter etc. I'm sure i'm missing some big ones, and I'm excepting the shows that shifted from high school to college, like 90210, Buffy, Gilmore Girls, or The O.C., because these were never really about college, though see my analysis of Buffy and the University below. Anyway, Greek wasn't particularly terrible, though it wasn't particularly good either. Some plot elements felt like they were being recycled from other shows or from films. the protagonist was doing a less awkward Jay Baruchel. And i guess the crazy christian roomate becomes the voice of conscience because it's abc family and not, like fox not fox news fox, where the crazy christians just fuck up your sex life and then disappear into non-continuity. Though there is a QPOC character, which would be interesting if i had any faith that the plotlines for the character wouldn't just wind up being lame. Mostly, Greek is somewhat hammy drama. Undeclared was probably a more accurate representation of someone's undergraduate experience - though not mine.
And Greek does nothing to make me a)understand why someone not as fascist as my freshman year roomate would want to join a fraternity or b) why i should stick around long enough to find out.

is this a song or an ipod commercial?

Bishop's University in Sherbrooke. Quebec has declared a lockout of all of its union employees in an attempt to "advance contract negotiations." I know that things are a bit different up there in Canada, but when (with the possible exception, or not, of professional sports,) has a lockout ever contributed to anything other than intimidation and union busting? Since when is it possible to use the phrase "remains committed to bargaining in good faith" in a lockout announcement?

The Specials - Rat Race

I had no idea there was a video for this song, which i liked a great deal in high school. The song itself seems like a trenchant critique of this blog, though the video makes things more interesting by making Terry Hall et al the proctors of the examinations which are capitalist-carceral state's means of evaluation and classification...

behind the walls/of the white house/there's a lot of things/that we should know about

Just saw Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings' free show in Battery Park, which was pretty good and did a great deal to save a day that was heavily and inexplicably sucking. New album coming out in october should be interesting. I have issues with the politics of retro and hipster investments in "antique" black cultural politics, but I also think Jones's music is more than that and her audience is as well. And the band is freaking awesome.

Walking down a street Fulton Ave in Clinton Hill yesterday on my way home to sunset park from where i am catsitting i passed a woman on the street who started yelling at me - something to the effect of "fucking white motherfucker, go where you fucking belong." I'm pretty sure she was addicted to some form of powerful coca-based narcotics and/pr mentally ill, but, more importantly, I also think she has a point. Clinton Hill is a heavily gentrified neighborhood with a large middle and working class African American community whose presence in the neighborhood long precedes the current brooklyn real estate boom. The forms of displacement and trasnformation wrought by skyrocketing rents and new construction are visible everywhere and sometimes/often legible as racialized violence. I don't live in Clinton Hill, but my presence on Fulton Street, catsitting for folks who live in a doorman building a block from the C on the avenue that, further down, city councilfolk from Bed-Stuy are fighting pitch battles over to name after Sonny Carson (for better or worse), is both a sign of that displacement and an invitation for further changes. Being a walking billboard for gentrification is not how i like to either spend my time or interact with the world. "Oh, the burdens of white privilege," you exclaim sarcastically, and I offer no response.

I finished Deathly Hallows yesterday. I am not going to get into it here, at least not yet, but i will say that the plot element i have been wanting to see more than anything else actually sort of happens. Five points to you if you've read it and can guess to which development i refer.

That's all for now.

This is the best thin ever.

I'm not sure what's better, the pikachu microphone, or the four year old girl playing air guitar during the main riff. No, wait, it's definitely the girl. (And in case you're unfamiliar with the New Wave of British Heavy Metal as covered by preadolescent Argentinians...)

I spent much of the late afternoon wandering the streets of midtown in search of tasti-d-lite. My lip was heavy with lidocaine, and i was unsure if i could keep anything else in my mouth. I found it just south of Bryant Park on sixth, but by that point the vegetable gum extract ice cream substitute was incidental and I had giulianification on my mind, and that meant I was thinking about "Shake The Superflux," Sam Grossman's high school era sonic landscape of post-diallo/louima Manhattan. The title comes from a line in King Lear. Stephen Greenblatt:

At the height of the storm scene, the crazed Lear, exposed to the tyranny of the elements, has a fleeting glimpse of a relationship to power different from the one he had embodied:

Take physic, pomp,
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them
And show the heavens more just.

(3.4.33–36)

The vision of obligation here is modest enough—"shake the superflux" (i.e., let some wealth trickle down to the wretches at the bottom)—but nothing in the play suggests that it is remotely possible to achieve. Lear lurches instead toward the conviction that there is no significant moral distinction between judges and thieves. "See how yon justice rails upon yon simple thief," he tells Gloucester; "Hark in thine ear: change places, and handy-dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief?" (4.5.143–145) All that secures the difference between them is a monopoly of violence. Have you ever "seen a farmer's dog bark at a beggar?" Lear asks. When you see the man running away from the cur, you behold "the great image of authority. A dog's obeyed in office" (4.5.145– 149). Those in power may loudly declare their compassion for the sufferings of the poor, but inevitably the declarations are mere hypocrisy. "Get thee glass eyes," Lear says bitterly to the blind Gloucester,

The song's gender politics are profoundly conservative ("naked dollar whores" as silent bodies that signify corruption and decay.) The impulse and politics are liberal and utterly bourgeois ("the stench of indigence can make you choke".) The objects of concern (perhaps sarcastically so) are the "guilded butterflies" who "don't mind throwing crumbs to troubled ducks," who must "open up [their] eyes" to the fact that "the free market kinda sucks," and thus redistribute some wealth. But the song does paint a canny portrait of New York under the second Giuliani administration - indeed, in 1998 and long after it struck me as profound - and thus it's even better as a descriptor of a particular subjectivity, a particular experience rooted in the corridors of ostensibly lefty private high schools and a limited but not useless liberal antiracism in which i was very much implicated and included. The problem is not and was never shaking the superflux, it was a politics in which the most radical gesture concerning the oppressed we can imagine is the excercise of (mere) compassion upon them by the oppressor. Well, not the only problem. But a big one.

I "roadied" Shamus Mcnasty's first gig, a winter dance at Stuyvesant High School, (where Chris, one of the guitarists, was a student.) (I wasn't the actual roadie, i was just the guy in charge of making sure a bass amp made it from 78th and Park to Chambers and North End.) Shamus McNasty went on hiatus in the fall of '99 when all the members went off to college, then played a couple shows in January and July of 2000. Sam, John, and Chris reunited as The Morningsides in 2003 and Sam and John are now 2/3 of the Wowz, whose entire second album can be downloaded here for free. They're all much better songwriters.

Anyway I was walking down 6th ave in the 50s and high 40s, and it's basically a canyon of glass and steel a la jesse michaels and I was thinking about all of this, though not particularly deeply. And I wonder what what song will bve left to sing and critique in the New York of eight years from now regardless of whether Giuliani's in the white house. But i also think there are melodies that a song like "Shake The Superflux" sings over, tries to drown out, and it's time to start singing those songs.

Amherst eliminates loans. Yale and NYU should follow suit, but they're too busy exploiting your debt. I blog this now because I was rudely drunk dialed about fifteen minutes ago and I'm disoriented and a little mad. Yes, linking to the worst band in the world mad. I know where you live.

"Or else fold like umbrellas"

On the uses of singing on picket lines...

"I'll Be There In An Hour?"

I finally heard the famous "Tim Version" (sans horns, alternate lyrics, and plus a little Bob Stinson guitar wankery) of "Can't Hardly Wait." It's intriguing, much more traditionally replacementsish (if such a descriptor makes any sense whatsoever) than the version which appears on Pleased To Meet Me. It's a little harsher. But ultimately I think it's a weaker song. The horns lend the PtMM version an epic presence that the earlier version lacks. But some of Stinson's guitar flourishes are nice, reminding the listener of how good Stinson could be when not totally fucked up, which, apparently, was all too rare, and Alex Chilton's production on the Tim cut sounds crisper than the Jim Dickinson version. But I'm declaring my allegiance to the sax lines and borrowed stamps of the later version. I might change my mind if you convince me that I'm wrong.

Meanwhile I take a break from an extended Curtis Mayfield bender to appreciate Sleater-Kinney's "What If I Was Right," which appeared on a Kill Rock Stars compilation in 2000 but was clearly recorded during the Hot Rock era and which I would place next to the other great b-sides from that era ("by the time you're 25," and "tapping,") as songs which could easily have been put on the finished album without reducing the quality or power of the finished product.

Also i want to link to what may well be the best music blog ever. In particular, check out his entry on Roy C's "Open Letter to The President." Unreal.

It turns out i got off better than my brother, whose practice space in "east williamsburg" got flooded with sewage.

Also, it has come to my attention that there is no "South Detroit." Which means no city boy was ever born or raised there.

so, uh Stop Believing?

It's Phoebe's Birthday, so happy birthday Phoebe. That means's it's also the 5th birthday of the Undergraduate Organizing Committee (July 18th was the initial meeting in Alek's apartment on Howe street - but i wasn't around that summer except for my semi-weekly trips up on Metro-North, so if there's a better periodization, Alek should feel free to chime in.) I celebrated both by getting caught in a monsoon and apparently destroying my iPod, which is appropriate cause i did that to my phone around the time of the UOC's first birthday. walking from Bishop street to the union office one morning over four years ago. On both occasions, it wasn't raining when i left the house. I'm not a total idiot, or maybe i am. The rain also cancelled my annual pilgrimage to the bronx zoo, which sucks but i'll deal.

At any rate,
back to work.

Somewhere along the line I became GSOC's surrogate cat lady. In the next month I'll be taking care of two cats that belong to other people in the union. Both of them were adopted off the street as homeless kittens abd both belong to historians. One is Spooky and the other is Wilson, which is funny, because if you put them together you get Spooky Wilson, which sounds like the Simpsons Halloween Episode version of a certain former Mets outfielder.

I hate the telephone. Or at least I hate phonebanking. I don't want to phonebank, but I will. Like the button.

(Currently listening to Curtis Mayfield's Roots)

I noticed a bunch of gray hairs while brushing my teeth tonight, and I wonder if I'm hallucinating, stressing myself too much, or actually just aging, or some combination thereof. I guess as long as the hair is still there, Keith Hernandez can go back to being a sexist idiot. Speaking of which, I made it to a mets game with my Family - and they lost, which sucked, but I suppose i was due after seeing a walk off win in '04 (albeit against the then abysmal Detroit Tigers and then Pedro Martinez's 10 strikeout complete game shutout of the first place Braves in '05. EJ and Dubba made my weekend, but I'm still pretending to be anonymous, so no further discussion of any of that.

Union stuff is picking up, which is good. And i won't talk about that here either yet. I would instead like to conclude by making a couple of declarative statements about popular music and harry potter films.

1. The Numero Group may have been credited with exploding the myth of a soul meritocracy - with some justification but Curtis Mayfield's post-impressions work still sounds unique and visionary.

2. Bobby Bland's "Ain't No Love In The Heart Of The City" may be the best song Jay-Z ever sampled (other suggestions besides "I Want You Back?") and the original is more interesting and haunting than his version.

3. I like the new spoon album more than i liked the last two. "You Got Yr Cherry Bomb," and "Don't You Evah" in particular are a lot more interesting than any other rock album i've heard in the last couple of months.

4. Billy Corrigan, what the fuck? Mellon Collie seems less excessive now, strangely, less dissapointing - and for me in '96 it was a huge dissappointment after Siamese Dream, far to self indulgent to ever be successfully experimental. Zero still sounds like a piece of shit. But Zeitgeist is cynicism of the worst sort, exploitative, vacuous, pretentious, occasionally seductive - because we want another Gish, we want another "Cherub Rock" or video for "Rocket," but this is not social criticism so much as self-aggrandisement.

5. I think The Order Of The Phoenix, flawed as it is, is my favorite book in the series. The film is good too, though not as good as Y Tu Potter of Men um i mean Prisoner of Azkaban. But i wonder how much we lose (Spanish Baggage Handler Strike, etc.) of the novel's nods to fascisms both Thatcherian and Bushic in the shortened screenplay even with all that does make it in. Also, i found the final line strangely moving not as a demarcation of alterity between "us" and "them," (the politics of the two most recent films seem to complicate such easy classifications and oppositions) but rather as a (probably much too easy and easily universal) reminder of what might be the point of fighting for social justice even when it gets tough and seems futile. I'm dorking out and this requires more careful wording than im capable of at 1:46 AM, so i'll leave you with that and instead go to sleep dreading the eventual onset of male pattern baldness and wondering how iTunes could be dumb enought to claim that Melissa Auf Der Mar was part of the Smashing Pumpkins' "original lineup.".

This is hilarious.

Gordon Lafer has written a detailed report for American Rights at Work on employer tactics to "avoid" or repress union drives and take advantage of the gaping failures of the NLRB election process. NHI reports on Lafer's most recent visit to New Haven, a city where all of this is hardly academic.

Well, at least in the pejorative sense, anyway.

I am 26 years old, as of yesterday. This frightens me. It frightens me because I often feel as if I have wasted much of the past three years, like this recent tendency to fall into things, to let life happen to me, as certain individuals for whom i hold profound respect put it in a rather intense little meeting almost a year and a half ago - more intense than any conversation i've had since i stopped organizing undergraduates - has rendered me increasingly useless academically, personally, and "politically," for lack of a better schema. It's doubtless not very productive to castigate myself publicly on the internet, and there's a school of thought, or a portion of my brain, to be a little less grandiose, which holds that every time i do i'm really just giving myself permission to decide that resistance is futile and slip into a complacent self loathing, or self loathing complacence. So suffice to say that I am neither particularly productive as an organizer or academic nor particularly happy as a human being, and these are all inseparable, and I need to so something about this. Working this out is my project for the rest of the summer - finishing my papers, doing everything i can to build the organizing, and trying to figure my life out. I don't want to be typing some more frenetic, desparate, or depressing analogue of these words in a year's time. The thought of getting older but not better terrifies me. And that sentence sounds so psychobabbly that i'm ashamed to have written it. I think being able to admit this to myself is a good thing, though.

I had a mildly humiliating evening, which consisted of being turned away from the bar i was trying to get inside for a friend's goodbye party due to lack of ID, and then having to sprint after the B63 from Garfield to like 6th street trying to get the bus home. The whole endeavor felt futile and embarrassing. But the evening was kind of saved by what i saw staring into the cemetery, waiting fro the bus to take me up to park slope before the comedy of errors started - fireflies, everywhere. I am fascinated by fireflies, both because bioluminescence is itself pretty amazing and because they signify something that i think Joss Whedon was all too aware of - that is, hope, and specifically perhaps the miraculous randomness of hope, its fragility but also its irrepressability and its ubiquity. By their very presence, the fireflies seemed to transform the cemetery - which has a certain ancient beauty to it, into something vibrant and otherworldly. I'll shut up about this now.

My two favorite Wilson Pickett songs are songs i first heard as covers by the Adjusters, "Mini-skirt Minnie" and "Toe Hold." They are both very good covers, but the originals are fantastic and you should check them out if you aren't familiar with them.

edit: this is pretty cool too.

Here's some of that hard-hitting, investigative journalism that Rupert Murdoch wants to do away with. Gotta love the witty interjection from the anti-union NYU prof...

I picked up this great Bettye Swann compilation from other music a few weeks ago. I was reading the liner notes today and the compiler talks about trying to track Swann down and how she dodged his questions and walked away from her music career because of "really rough times." The whole narrative seems to remove agency in the creative process from Swann and place it in the hands of this dude trying to track her down, trying to unearth her work, trying to restore her music/name to never-realized former glories a la British orientalism (Jones et al.) (sorry, still rereading Said.) All of which, aside from being politically problematic around issues of representation and the racialized logics of creative labor and intellectual property, also begs the question - is she actually being paid for any of this? If this person can't even really locate her, how is she getting a check?

I think part of my ambivalence about finding a new place comes from the fact that the move i really want to make right now is to another city and possibly another profession, but i'm not doing any of those at the moment, and instead i just kinda sit around and try to write and passivley wait for the future to happen against the prescient advice two of the best organizers i have ever met gave me almost a year and a half ago.

I should follow by clarifying that my desire ot leave new york stems not from the sort of "been there done that" cum "New York is mean and overbearing and i make millions writing bad songs about how alienated i feel" B.S. for which i have pilloried certain sectors of the Indie Rock establishment. I appreciate and am thankful that New York is bigger than, more than, North Square and North Six, Theory and Anthropologie and etc. I just want to be somewhere else.

Meanwhile the increasing numbers of young white folks moving into sunset park seem to be hailing from increasingly elevated income brackets and wearing increasingly hip clothing, and i'm totally complicit in this, and i',m frustrated that my only contribution to this neighborhood in the years i've lived here seems to have been as a pioneer for successive waves of gentrification.

Anyway, speaking of hipsters, i am excited about the new New Pornographers CD. Ah NAFIJWA, you hypocrite. I wonder if anonymity has run its course. I'll be 26 on tuesday and I feel like I am wasting too much time not particularly productively moving towards a profession i don't know that i want to enter. At the very least I wonder if I shouldn't have waited several more years to start grad school, and as counterproductive as this sort of speculation is it's also pretty addictive.

So I turn to "Becoming Part 2," specifically the scene in which Angel/us is about to kill Buffy, and taunts her by telling her that she has "no weapons, no friends, no hope," and then asks her, mockingly, what is left as he thrusts his sword at her neck (phallic much?) She says "me." stops the blade with her hands and breaks it in two. Of course, then he gets his sould back and hse has to kill him anyway to stop the world from being sucked into hell, so maybe that's not the best place to look for inspiration. Or maybe the point is that shit is hard, and you have to do things that are extremely difficult and gut wrenching, and you have to do them and move forward anyway and then you have to deal with the consequences. Alright, the ADD's kicked in, I'm babbling about Buffy, and somewhere between the first and fourth paragraphs this got way too emo, so i'll have mercy on you, dear reader, (apostrophe!) and end it here.

The symbolism is rich indeed,

Symbolically opening a pair of doors on Washington Square East that had been locked for 10 years, New York University welcomed neighborhood residents into its Hemmerdinger Hall last Thursday for an open house on its new strategic planning initiative.

“Nobody can remember the last time those doors were open,” said John Beckman, the university’s spokesperson. “The people in Lori Mazor’s group felt it was important to open them.”

The custodial staff didn’t have the key, however, so N.Y.U. had to call a locksmith to open the entrance.

but the model for "community involvement" still seems rather impoverished, too dependent on Sexton's megalomaniacal "i want you to love me" bloviating (as opposed to his "I will crush you into submission" bloviating, which he also does) and with no attempt to engage any "community" beyond presumably very wealthy residents of the west village. When NYU starts negotiating with FIERCE, I'll be impressed.

Also, Toshiko Mori doesn't like Bobst or Kimmel.

“Kimmel Student Center is a disaster,” she said, wrinkling her nose in distaste. “Bobst is quite foreboding. There’s something ominous about it. It’s one thing to be monumental, but there’s something sinister about it. It doesn’t reflect what N.Y.U. today is — which is very urban, engaged with the community and active, accessible. Of course, Bobst is way too big for the space, and urbanistically you have to take into account Washington Square — which, next to it, makes it double [in terms of Bobst’s inappropriately large size]. Gould Plaza is desolate.”

I'm less disgusted by the scale than I am the emptiness of both buildings. Bobst has relatively few books - it's mostly open space and panoptical windows and administrative offices. Kimmel as a student space leaves something to be desired, mired in overwhelming levels of bureaucracy and always existing in the context of the privatization of a broader set of public uses for Washington Square park and Greenwhich village which may at this point be long gone. That said, we;re in agreement over the 12th street dorm

Also, weren''t those supposedly never-open doors open for a) this and b) this? What does it say about a new era of openness and community participation when they are apparently lying through their teeth from the get-go?

Also, the cops can still search you in the subway and the government can still illegally wiretap you

This blog would like to thank the following cultural texts:

1. The Soul Jazz records compilation The Sound of Philadelphia - Funk, Soul and the roots of Disco 1965-1973: Philadelphia Roots Volume 2 and Chairman Palm for introducing me to The Three Degrees' "Collage," which is a pretty amazing song.

2. The Freda Payne antiwar song "Bring the Boys Home," which we should understand as a strategic gesture, not only a masculinist failure.

3. Pat Benatar's "Hell Is For Children," the most uncomfortably anthemic song about child abuse until Soul Asylum dropped "Runaway Train."

4. The original transformers movie, with Eric Idle as an anarchist junkyard robot and Orson Welles! as an evil robot planet bent on destruction and t.error. Replete with awesome cheesy 80's music including Weird Al Yankovic back when he still had a moustache.

5. Intermission, the recent 2-disc greatest hits compilation of the respective solo careers of Grant Mclennan and the late, great Robert Forster, the creative team behind the Go-Betweens. I didn't even realize they'd had solo careers after the Go-Betweens broke up in the late 80's and then reformed in 2000, but there is some great stuff here.

6. Orientalism. (to which I now return.)

The times reports that a judge wants an investigation of possible collusion between Columbia University and the Empire State Development Corporation, a state agency that finances higher education real estate projects. Columbia and the ESDC are using the same consultant in "determining" whether to proceed with a possible eminent domain landgrab of west Harlem for Columbia's much ballyhooed science campus expansion.

If the ESDC is colluding with Columbia, where else is it showing such deference to neoliberal universities' gentrification agendas over the concerns of local communities and organizations? The ESDC provides substantial financial incentives to universities. Maybe this all needs significantly greater scrutiny...

Meanwhile, John Sexton tries to assuage community fears over NYU expansion. I blogged about this last week, but what strikes me about Karen Arenson's piece is how incomplete any dialogue that only includes 300 "community members" can be, and the necessarily overdetermined place of the Nadler-Quinn task force in keeping NYU honest. Won't work. Not by itself. What will change the way NYU interacts with not only the long since gentrified neighblorhoods around it, but also the rest of the city and the state and region, is a strong, dynamic movement for social justice from the ground up, which links folks working on campus and around the city. This isn't possible without GSOC, without strong campus labor movements constantly pushing and transforming the university. And I don't think academic labor movements can ever win unless we adopt tactics like these.