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.