I missed a stop on the subway today for the first time in like ten years. I don't miss stops on the subway. With the exception of the years i spent in new haven or the odd day when i don't go into manhattan or i walk both ways or something, i've been taking the subway more or less every day of my life since august of 1995 (when we moved from the burbs to the city right before 8th grade) and i know it very, very well. And yet I missed a stop, and looked like an idiot, i am sure, as i tried, and failed, to make it through the doors into the west 4th street station before they closed.

Instead i decided it was fate telling me to try Columbia's Butler library instead of the panopticon, but wound up at my parents' appartment eating tasti-d-lite out of a bucket, pretending to get work done, watching Hellboy II which, without Ron Perelman's lame dialogue (not, I think, the fault of the actor) could have been a halfway decent Guillermo Del Toro film. As it was, the combination of eerie dark faerie tale (good) and stilted cliched superhero film dialogue (bad) didn't work so well. Hellboy's a comic I never read. Indeed, other than Sin City, I don't think i read any of the stuff generated through the Dark Horse Comics Legend imprint - which included Sin City in all its beautifully rendered but narratively unimaginative glory (maybe i'm just taking potshots at frank miller for his recent history of making terrible films and supporting the invasion of iraq as the european front in a world war II analogy if september 11 was pearl harbor, which it wasn't), some John Byrne stuff, Madman (I think), and something bu Art Adams, Paul Chadwick, and Geaoff Darrow if memory and internets serve me correctly. Anyway my point is that i have no idea if the character actually speaks in such a cliched, shallow manner as depicted in the film, but i felt like Del Toro and Mike Mignolo could have benefitted from someone else who wasn't directing the film or responsible for creating the character to help with the script.

Also caught part of the Gilmore Girls episode where they tour Yale and the show's protagonists keep saying insulting and subtly racist things about New Haven. Not only that it's worse than the dump but that it's the left over crap at the bottom of the coffee pot. Yeah. I mean it may be accurate in representing the kinds of claims that suburban Connecticutians make about the deindustrialized belt along the state's southern shore (and throw Hartford and maybe Waterbury and/or Danbury in for good measure, though Waterbury's problems seemd to stem in part from the fact that its former Republican mayor - and the republican opponent to Joe Lieberman in the 2000 senate election - paid a crack addicted prostitute to let him rape her daughters and Danbury's mayor is an anti-immigrant fascist if the same guy's still in office) but also speaks to the kinds of racial and class politics that lay beneath the surface of the palladinos' small town utopia.

Tomorrow back to paper writing and gramsci reading. Coming soon is the requisite year-end post. Also, whatever good reasons some people may have had for bombing universities in the past, what Israel has done in Gaza this weekend is terrorism, pure and simple, attacking captive civilian populations in a brazen attempt to convince them by attrition to reject their democratically elected government. Fuck all government and fuck Hamas, but the fact that american politicans can vociferously support this murderous shit and then claim to be against terrorism is blatant hypocrisy - a fact which seems entirely unimportant at the close of a three day period which has left over 350 people dead, many of them civilians. (The U.N's conservative estimate is that 60 were civilians, other sources have indicated much higher numbers.)

I made Latkes yesterday, and it was awesome, and i felt like a productive human being. They tasted good. I made something that tasted good. I totally understand why people love to bake.

Also i walked a lot, only from my apartment to canal and varick, not nearly the 12-mile oddyssey of thanksgiving day, but fun nonetheless. Today i went out for lunch but my big accomplishment was being able to fall asleep without taking an advil first for the first time since i had my wisdom teeth out a week and a half ago. Now it's back to rereading Moishe Postone's Time, Labor, and Social Domination.

Random ten:
The Menahan Street Band - The Traitor
Robert Johnson - 32-20 Blues
Joe Bataan - "Johnny" I must skipped this one every time i listened to the Joe Bataan Anthology, since i don't recognize it at all. It's kinda great.
Dennis Alcapone - Shades of Hudson
Manu Chao - The Bleedin Clown
Black Merda - Long Burn The Fire
Crass - The Immortal Death
dead prez - sellin' d.o.p.e.
the pipettes - pull shapes
the breeders - drivin' on 9.

The anomalous wave-turin make like Godard's supermarket situationists and expropriate a bookstore

Students went in front of the bookstore and opened a banner saying “Against the crisis: self-reduction - Anomalous Wave Turin”. They had few hundreds of second hand books which they gave to passers-by. Finally the students went inside the bookshop, symbolically occupying it, demanding and taking few hundreds of books, which were later distributed to people for free.

“In this way, the Way wanted to protest against the high costs of books, but also to show in practice that another form of circulation of knowledge is possible, free of charge, based on valuation of the use value, against commercial distribution and capitalistic speculation which subordinates knowledge to the logic of money, profit, value of exchange”.

How amazing would it be if folks would do something like this at NYC's chain bookstores? At the NYU bookstore? At Amazon.com's union busting warehouses?

random ten for snow and revolution

The Clientele - Dance of the Hours
Robert Forster - Danger in the Past
We The People - You Burn Me Up and Down
Pete Rock & C.L. Smooth - Anger In The Nation
Incredible Bongo Band - Bongolia
Genius/GZA - Labels
Refused - Hook, Line & Sinker
Chalice - Good to be there
Utah Phillips (covering Joe Hill) - There is Power in a Union
Camper Van Beethoven - Yanqui Go Home


Happy Hannukah

It's nice and snowy out, but i'm stuck inside for the most part this weekend, rushing against time and inertia to get my grades in. Having spent most of thursday standing on the sidewalk outside the New School's Graduate Faculty building didn't help much (with the grading.) I was going to post some lessons i took from what I saw during the occupation - the opportunities created by the conjuncture and the strategies such a conjuncture encouraged, some of the problems, etc, but i'm not sure that a public blog is the best place for such ruminations. I will say, though, that the rush by some anarhcists to condemn the settlement as collaborationist strikes me as short sighted. I consider myself an anarchist, but I'm not sure why that has to involve the utter collapse of politics and tactics, the total fetishization of direct action beyond prefigurative politics to the point of pathology, the inability to think in terms of longues durees and the assumption that any action that does not produce widespread revolutionary uprisings (which i'm all for) must be categorized as a failure and must therefore have been hijacked by collaborationsists and crypto-liberals. There's nothing inherently bourgeois, counter-revolutionary, statist, or anti-democratic about strategy, about committing to build movements that keep growing, about not dismissing everyone who isn't waving around The Conquest of Bread or rocking an anti-flag patch on their knapsack as a outre statist yuppie.

"Outside" solidarity could have been more focused at times - the cuny contingent that showed up around 10 PM on Thursday was really brilliant in terms of channeling the power and focus of the crowd. Letting anyone who wants to speak is cool, but there has to be some way to deal with the sectarian crazies and didactic anarcho-individualists who think they're teaching you something by shouting the same tired slogans over everyone else.

There are many things the New School In Exile folks did that were very, very effective. I won't rehearse them here because I think its best for us to practice some semblance of security culture, at least online, about how we discuss the weaknesses of administrative and police repression tactics and the stregnth of how folks challenged them, but i don't want it to seem like I'm being a whiny mr. complainsalot. On the contrary, i find yesterday's victory inspiring and encouraging and the collection of folks inside and outside of 65 5th avenue was exciting to be a part of. I was particularly struck by how explicit folks were about tying their work to what's been going on in Greece and Italy ("We're in Greece, We're in Rome, Tell Bob Kerrey To Go Home," "Occupiamo Tutto,") etc. I think the question on all of our minds should be where does this go next? How do we expand the struggle? How do we "generalize the wave," as it were?

a las barricadas

Spent some time today over at the occupied new school, watched the NYPD, particularly Officer Singer of the 6th precinct harrass and assault people for no reason whatsoever, until the administration got smart and diffuesed the very hairy situation by letting the new school students trapped outside the graduate faculty building back inside to join those still occupying the cafeteria. At least two people were arrested. I saw one of the arrests - a guy just handing out flyers whom police forced onto the ground. Officer Singer pulled a Baton on a friend of mine and a New School security goon pushed an NYU undergrad onto the ground, again, without any justification. But as of this writing, the occupation is still going strong, and there's a rally planned for 10:00 tonight that folks in the city should try to be at. Check out updates here and at their blog here.

ETA: That would be at 65 5th Avenue, btw 13th and 14th. The occupiers have reported that police have returned to the area but as yet no violence has occurred...

The Anomalous Wave Hits 5th Ave

Just got this via email.

From New York City:

We have just occupied New School University.

We liberate this space for ourselves, and all those who want to join us, for our general autonomous use. We take the university in explicit solidarity with those occupying the universities and streets in Greece, Italy, France and Spain.

This occupation begins as a response to specific conditions at the New School, the corporatization of the university and the impoverishment of education in general. However, it is not just this university but also New York City that is in crisis: in the next several months, thousands of us will be losing our jobs, while housing remains unaffordable and unavailable to many and the cost of living skyrockets.

So we stress that the general nature of these intolerable conditions exists across the spectrum of capitalist existence, in our universities and our cities, in all of our social relations. For this reason, what begins tonight at the New School cannot, and should not, be contained here.

Thus: with this occupation, we inaugurate a wave of occupations in New York City and the United States, a coming wave of occupations, blockades, and strikes in this time of crisis.

Be assured, this is only the beginning,

With solidarity and love from New York to Greece,

To Italy, France and Spain,

To the coming insurrection.

-The occupied New School

Holy crap!!!

YNHH, the state, and the post-fordist city

I'm in the process of working out my dissertation proposal, which is about the history of service workers at urban universities, about what the expansion and restructuring of universities looks like when read through the experiences of racialized and gendered food service, maintenance, custodial, clerical, and technical workers. I'm also going to talk about, but have been thus far giving short shrift to, workers at university hospitals, which have been a major part of the aforementioned expansion as universities prioritize the maintenance and care of bodies in what's been an era dominated by economies of biopolitical (re)production. Universities and their teaching hospitals have come to dominate the social and physical geography of urban spaces - just look at this peice today in the New Haven Independent reporting that Yale has now completed it's formal takeover of the building that was once an important Hill neighborhood high school (and site of student protest) and has in the process subtracted even more New Haven real estate, as one anonymous commenter notes, from the city's dwindling tax base.

And if that isn't a good enough reason why i need to more centrally address the effects of hospital service work on the terrain of post-fordist labor relations, Undergraduate Organizing Committee member Hugh Baran offers readers of The Nation an even more instructive tale about a violated community benefits agreement, an intimidated and betrayed group of 1800 Yale New Haven hospital employees, and one of the clearest examples we have of the necessity of card check neutrality agreements in protecting the rights of working people, and a strong message about the role of the state in protecting or assailing workers' voices. Whether you're like me, and you've been following what's happened at the hospital, on whose governing board many Yale executives and trustees sit, along with local New Haven plutocrats and a scant few medical professionals, since you watched Rick Levin shrug off questions from concerned SLAC members eight years ago, or you're learning of this just now (in which case, welcome to the blog) Hugh writes powerfully about what YNHH tells us about U.S. labor politics, and you should go read his article.

things to do today

1. turn two thirty-five page exams into a five page lit review section. I think i can do this.
2. revise my chapter breakdown to add a chapter on the postwar emergence of the "federal grant university," the impact of the massification of the university on service workers' lives.
3.Take a stab at a methodology section.
4. eat.

(don't read this if you haven't finished season 5 of the wire.)

Apparently the guardian has published a list of the "biggest douchebags" of 2008. I have several comments. I'm interested, first, in when "douchebag" became permissible speech in UK and US alternative newsmedia outlets. Has it become, like "fuck" or "asshole" urmoored from its association with pathologized female sexual hygeine, with commoditized pudenda? I ask not because i am offended by the list's prurience or because I believe that if one were to refer to, say, Jacob Lew of NYU/Citigroup fame as a "douchebag" one would be conjuring up the specter of "dirty" vaginas in need of corporate commercial cleaning products (hello biopower,) but because i think the question of what, precisely, douchebag means at present in this particular context and how it comes to mean what it means is probably worth asking to someone.

As for the content of the list, well, i don't know what "Eggheads" is, and I don't know who Timothy Mallet is, nor am i that well versed in the specifics of the Andrew Sachs-Russell Brand affair, so let's leave aside those three. I don't think that Soulja Boy line makes him a douchebag. I don't know the song that well, I don't know how seriously one can take a claim such as that. I'm not necessarily arguing that Soulja Boy's drowning in false consciousness as suggesting that maybe we're supposed to take something else away from the sentence than the compiler of this list assumes.

The "little hopper" is named Kenard, and I fail to see how he is a "douchebag." I certainly don't think that is what David Simon and Ed Burns were attempting to convey here. Leaving aside problems with the phrase douchebag which i'll return to below, that Kenard's the douchebag here and not Valcheck, Rawls, Carcetti, or the newspaper Powers That Be exemplifies the kind of sanctification of Omar Little which the character's death is supposed to deflate and which made season three my least favorite (Omar and Brother Mouszone at the ok corral? Can't we go back to this character's intriguing humanity?)

The sexism's certainly apparent in the rationale for naming Sarkozy, whose political loathsomeness has much to do with his chauvinism and nativism and little to do with his wife. Bankers may well be douchebags, but more importantly, as Boots Riley reminds us, "every banker is a fucking thief." Douchebag unites fascist, neoliberal profiteer, and minor annoyance under the sign of failed masculinity. Masculinity's always failed, i guess, but you know what I mean. Maybe arguing with the premise of a stupid year end list is futile and by spending the last hour doing so instead of working on my diss proposal i've already been won over. Ah, fuck it.

Nirvana - "Stain"

The Rulers - "Copacetic"

MIA& Diplo - Bingo (Diplo Mix) Some "mix," Diplo. (it's just the "Big Pimpin" Riddim.)

Sir Victor Uwaifo & His Melody Maestros - Akayan Ekassa

Go Betweens "Bow Down"

Woody Guthrie - "Dust Can't Kill Me"

The Vaselines - "Molly's Lips." I used Nirvana's Vaselines covers to prove a poiunt last night.

Budos Band - Ghost Walk

Culture - See Them A Come

Michael Washington - Little Girl

Hard Times?

Colleges and universities are claiming hardships as endowments plummet. Harvard's 36 billion dollar fund is now in the mid twenties, and they've already implemented a salary freeze and suspended all searches, opting to rely instead on newly minted PhDs in unstable "teaching postdoc" positions. How convenient!

NYU's endowment is at best 1/10th the size of harvard's, despite an undergraduate population that's four times larger, but that hasn't stopped John Sexton and co. from dropping massive amounts of money on prime downtown real estate. The New York observer reports that NYU recently purchased 726 Broadway (which already housed the student health center and the religious studies dept) for $210 million. Sexton, meanwhile, all brilliantly faked financial aid flyers notwithstanding, really is telling students who can't afford the ballooning tuition at NYU to try elsewhere.

Yesterday, student activists at the New School, where faculty just overwhelmingly voted no confidence in University President and former U.S. Senator Bob Kerrey, sat in the administration building for six hours to protest the university's relationship with the military contractor L-3 Communications:

Students were protesting the treasurer of the Board of Trustees,
Robert B. Millard, because of his position as chairman of the
executive committee of the military contractor L-3 Communications.
L-3 Communications provides a large percentage of the "intelligence
personnel" employed in illegal detention centers in Iraq, Afghanistan,
and Guantanamo Bay, and is currently facing four lawsuits from Iraqis
tortured at Abu Ghraib...

The students participating in the sit-in remained patient, relatively
quiet and un-confrontational while they waited to see if the Board
would grant their requests. Other students brought pizza and coffee
to those participating in the sit-in. After about an hour, students
realized the Board was not going to meet with them and they pushed
into the blocked off area, passed the security guards and attempted to
climb the stairs that led to where the Board was meeting. The
security guards prevented the students from entering the meeting and
the students began to lead chants around investment disclosure and the
removal of Millard. The meeting, which was happening directly above
where the students were chanting, was forced to move because of the
demonstrators. The trustees' coats and personal items at the coat
check next to the students were passed up one by one to a staff member
on the stairs. The students moved outside around 6:30pm when they
realized a car was waiting at the basement exit of the building—the
only alternative exit to the front door. The group disbanded around
7pm after most of the Trustees had left the vicinity. A security
guard informed one RSU member that the Board of Trustees meeting,
which was scheduled to end at 8pm, ended an hour and a half early, at
6:30pm.

Speaking of sit-ins, the republic window workers won theirs today, their factory occupation translating into the money owed them as well as a new organization dedicated to repopening their plant. Maybe we really are seeing Buenos Aires style recuperation on the horizon...

Also, there may be social revolutions taking place in Greece and Italy...

Tomorrow at 5:30 I'll be outside the union square bank of america just a block up from the GSOC office, standing in solidarity with the employees of the Republic Window factory in Chicago who are occupying their factory to demand the back pay owed them/save their jobs. The workers have called for nationwide solidarity actions at noon - there's going to be a big one in Chicago. And an earlier march is being planned here in NY by the IWW leaving from St. Mark's Church at noon, which i might also stop by.

Meanwhile, I think the staples singers put it best:



(I love how the reproductive, feminized labor of the household and domestic service gets placed before waged or unwaged "masculine" "productive" labor and both precede and situate and articulate the nationalist narrative framework through reference to "the control over unpaid labor." Capital v1 p 672. Imperialism's the "materialization of unpaid labor time" spatially diffused and writ large across the globe, the movement of labor and capital, the commodification of workers and the labor of racialized and commoditized workers.)

Edited again to add that this performance precedes "The Power of Women and the Subversion of Community" by a whole year. Also see Silvia Federici's critique of post/autonomist, post/operaist theories of precarity, which i think is at moments extremely insightful, though I disagree with some of her claims.

Raekwon - spot rushers
Fugees - Fu-Gee-La
Smokey Robinson & The Miracles - Yester Love
The Harbinger Complex - I Think I'm Down
Kool G Rap & DJ Polo - It's a Demo
Blowfly - Butterfly Theme.
A.C. Newman - On The Table
Smashing Pumpkins - Plume. 7th grade locker room flashbacks.
J.D.s - Funky Party Time.
Jesus Acosta and The Professionals - Guadija

random ten

Television, "Friction."
Wu Tang Clan ft Gerald Alston - "Stick Me for My Riches."
Beaufort Express - "You Got To Do Your Best."
Sharon Jones & The Dap Kings - "Be Easy"
The Advantage - "Guardian Legend - Corridor I." I love this band.
Linton Kwesi Johnson - "Two Sounds of Silence"
The Advantage - "Ghosts 'n' Goblins"
Jospehine Taylor - "I've made up my mind"
Sonic Youth "swimsuit issue"
The (International) Noise Conspiracy - "The Reproduction of Death." I used to love this band before Rick Rubin got ahold of them. Discuss.

This week has been a rather brutal one for several reasons. I'm going to have to get my wisdom teeth pulled, and my mouth hurts. So does my skull. My 92 year old grandparents and my sexagenarian parents were in a harrowing car crash that they are very lucky to have survived and survived with only bruises and aches (and I am very lucky that they did so.) Work is piling up, and I'm wondering again what the hell I'm doing here, and feeling generally useless, and not at all surprised by that study that suggests the more tv you watch the unhappier you are - in college, when i was much smarter than i am now, i would have said this was reductionist and indicative of the obsession of a particularly fraction of the bourgeoisie with policing the consumption practices of the less cultured (in the Arnoldian/Bordieuian sense.) Now I'm cursing ridiculous Grey's Anatomy plotlines and wondering why my head feels so heavy (is it the teeth? My brain atrophying? Stress?) And I'm staring at this and wondering who drew it. (Book doesn't specifically say, but credits one Andy Dark with the jacket design. Dark, according to Ashley Dawson, was an antiracist SWP youth organizer, so this makes some sense, though the image reminds me of the style of the "deconstructionist" british comic books of the time (1988. Brian Bolland, David Lloyd, maybe. Some of the people doing Moore's Miracleman.) This may be because I'm an idiot. Perhaps this image is really famous, and i'm just two ignorant of the cultural iconography of Thatcherite Britain to realize it.

Anyway.

Random ten songs from the ipod:

Beatles - Polythene Pam
Voices of East Harlem - Music in the Air
Sleater-Kinney - Steep Air
Desmond Dekker & The Aces - Rudy Got Soul
Amy Winehouse - Rehab. forgot i owned this album.
Le Tigre - LT Tour Theme
Miles Davis - Darn That Dream
Rufus Thomas - Do That Push and Pull (Part 1)
Nathan Wilkes - Strenge Feeling
Jackie Mittoo - Black Organ

For those of you who are New Yorkers or in the tri-state area, tomorrow evening (Thursday, November 20th,) the Coalition for Fair Labor at NYU is holding a panel discussion entitled "Who's Building The Global U," examining the conditions of the migrant labor that will build and operate NYU's satellite campus. The event is co-sponsored by Human Rights Watch and Law Students for Human Rights, and will take place in Furman Hall, room 214. Speakers include Human Rights Watch's SarahLeah Whitson and NYU Historian Molly Nolan. For more information, go here

Yesterday twenty members of the Yale Undergraduate Organizing Committee led a four-hour sit in in the university's investments office to protest - and to try to get a meeting with David Swensen about - Yale's endowment investments in the abusive hotel corporation HEI. The YDN article is priceless, complete with a snippy dismissal from Tom Conroy and the supposition that Swensen came up to the floor at one point, saw the students, closed the elevator without leaving it, and fled.

But, in the end, the students did not meet with anyone in the office. At 1:45 p.m., Landino had to leave to catch a flight back to California so he could report to work at 5 a.m. on Wednesday. As Landino left, the student protesters applauded him and then packed up their belongings. All 16 students crammed into one elevator for the trip downstairs chanting, “We’ll be back.”

Though no meeting materialized, the students and Landino said they still considered the event a success.

“We did not speak with him but we left a very clear message,” Landino said through a translator. “Like farmers we’ve planted something that is going to grow and we will reap the rewards.”

Before they left, the students wrote a note for Swensen on a yellow legal pad, which concluded, “We are firmly resolved to see this matter through to the end.”

Targeting university endowment investments is one of the most powerful and important ways activists and workers can fight to make universities more just places. It challenges the university's circuits of capital accumulation, exposes the ways in which universities participate in, and affect a broad swathe of economic activities and command the labor of diverse and deterritorialized groups of workers, and it hits the university's neoliberal foundations on multiple fronts and from many sites, making possible a truly global struggle against the "global (network) university."



For more on Unite-HERE's campaign against HEI, go here, here, here, and here

In case you had any doubts about the NYU board of trustees' priorities

In a year when John Sexton forced a destructive strike, harassed, fired, and blacklisted graduate student employees, spat in the faculty's face (metaphorically,) and raised undergrad tuition by more than 5%, he was given a 56% pay increase by Marty Lipton and the other powers that be on the university's bloated corps of high finance miscreants that is its ruling body. $1.3 million. That's like Swensen money. More, actually. And NYU's endowment is about 1/10th the size of the one Swensen's presided over, though both have invested in predatory hedge funds like Farallon Capital Management and both like to gobble up urban real estate for private gain.

The Washington Square News is understandably miffed.

In addition to many unjustifiably elusive statements, NYU has yet to reveal whether the opinions of faculty and students are considered in the evaluation. It was in 2006 that the committee decided to increase Sexton’s base salary, a year of controversial graduate student strikes. Despite vocal disapproval of Sexton’s response to the strikes by student groups and members of the faculty, the committee still decided to raise his salary.

President Sexton’s salary might be raising at an entirely justifiable rate. But until the university becomes more candid about its methods, suspicions will justifiably abound.

Sounds like they might have something in common with those "angry radicals" after all.

And more reasons why Jacob Lew shouldn't be managing the federal budget.

No, he can't.

The NYT's reporting that Jacob Lew may be tapped for an Obama administration job. There are many reasons why those of us who care about workers' rights, economic justice, and the future of higher education, among other things, should oppose this.

• Lew is a Clintonite neoliberal significantly to the right of where Obama ran during both the primary and the general campaign. He's one of those people Obama made a very good case for not entrusting another four or eight years to, because his fiscal policies aren't very progressive at all.
• After leaving NYU, Lew went to Citigroup's Alternative Investments division, which manages private equity, hedge funds, and real estate investments - in other words, very risky, un- or underregulated high yield investments. This doesn't speak well of his interest in or ability to help people feeling the weight of the credit crisis, given his involvement in the industries that created it. And finally:
• As executive vice president of New York University, Jacob Lew played a major role in carrying out the campaign to crush GSOC-UAW Local 2110. Thousands of workers were subject to threats and intimidation, dozens were blacklisted and fired, and Lew was instrumental in refusing to negotiate and in the vicious rhetoric and tactics the University Leadership Team employed. Some accounts have Lew even more invested than president Sexton in breaking the union. In the last eight years we've seen the state once again bend over backwards to fight attempts by workers to build power on the job and assert a voice in their work and in the direction of the country. We don't need more union-busters in office, particularly not in the administration of a president who owes much to the labor movement and on whose support for the Employee Free Choice Act and the Teaching and Research Assistants Collective Bargaining Rights Act many of us have placed our hopes for change.
  

This isn't someone progressives and leftists want managing the federal budget or advising the president on domestic policy.

snowballing

Trying to shut its security guards up, NYU's management imposes a gag order, and tells guards that by speaking out about cutbacks, in effect, they're helping the terrorists.

Undergrads aren't happy. Maybe because they've internalized the logic of student as consumer, maybe because they're complicit in NYU's racialized security apparatus, maybe because they're being ripped off by the university's grandiose expansion plans, probably all of the above, and in any event they have a right to be pissed off, and, more importantly, the guards have a right to speak out about what's happening and not have John Beckman try to brand them as traitors. But then, that's pretty much par for the course.

Wait, did i just make a golf metaphor?

more with less

More NYU cutbacks, this time to security officers, whose night shifts at certain dorms are being eliminated, according to the WSN. Guards are speaking out.

Even with reduced staffing, the dorm posts are normally manageable, guards say. But if anything goes wrong, there may be no one to respond immediately. In emergencies, guards cannot leave their posts; instead, they must call Public Safety and request backup.

That can take time, one noted. Once, after a roof-top alarm went off, it took more than 20 minutes for another officer to arrive at the building to check, the guard on duty at the time said.

Last spring, a faculty in residence suffered a heart attack. There were three guards working in the building; after being alerted by the faculty member’s spouse, they assisted emergency responders, holding doors and elevators to speed the team’s access to the professor, according to a guard.

The response “would have been slower” with the new cuts, the guard said.

At the Third Avenue North dining hall, a student reportedly fainted several weeks ago. Guards remained at their posts and called for backup. According to two guards familiar with the situation, the girl was left in the dining hall for five to 10 minutes waiting for the responding officer.

John Beckman isn't pleased.

“I think it is deeply regrettable that some security officers would try to frighten members of the NYU community by wrongly suggesting that entirely reasonable new deployment patterns in any way make them unsafe,” he said. “I consider it very much out of character with the kind of dedication to NYU the vast majority of our officers customarily display, and I would be disappointed if they were saying such things over a matter such as overtime.”

And President Sexton faces another contentious town hall meeting in his failed faux-proletarian Brooklyn Prep sweatshirt.

ABC news has a lengthy report this morning on the conditions of migrant labor in Abu Dhabi, with particular focus on the NYU satellite campus.

"We don't believe that they are doing nearly enough to avoid the exploitation of workers in their own projects," said Human Rights Watch's Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of the organization's Middle East and North Africa division. She said that the institutions have not made public commitments to ensuring that its construction workers are not exploited.

Whitson says that while the UAE government needs to investigate, prosecute and penalize contactors that break the nation's labor laws, these organizations need to take responsibility themselves. These measures, she said, should include reimbursing workers who are found to have paid an illegal recruiting fee (one of the most common abuses that can total as much as $3000), ceasing dealings with contractors who use recruiters who charge such fees, ensuring that housing and work sites are safe and that health and safety records are kept, and guaranteeing that workers' passports are not confiscated and that monthly wages are paid regularly.

random eight reggae songs, one appropriation thereof, and Phil Ochs

The Pioneers - "Let Your Yeah Be Yeah"

Desmond Dekker (and the Aces) - 007 (Shanty Town)

Phil Ochs - "Santo Domingo." ("There's been a drastic change in American foreign policy. Take the Dominican Republic. Which we did.") (cover)

Trinity Meets Dillinger - "Jesus Dread"

The Toasters - "Ploughshares into Guns"

U-Roy and the Paragons - "Tide is High." Here's the non-DJ version, sans U-roy.

Skatalites - "Lawless Street"

Shark Wilson & The Basement Heaters - "Make it Reggae" Cover of this, obviously.

Leonard Santic All Stars - "Santic Special"

Augustus Pablo - East of the River Nile Last night i dreamed of Melodicas.

Taught the "Diaspora, Utopia, and the Critique of Capitalism" chapter from There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack today. Went ok. I probably talked too much, brought in too much music, but it was fun to make them grapple with Linton Kwesi Johnson and "Israelites" and even "Ghost Town," which someone said something really funny about, though i don't remember what it was. Like it sounded science fictiony or something. I got more questions than i was expecting about the origins and implications of the 1990s ska revival in the U.S., given that my students were, on average, 10-12 years old in 1998, when that party, for most purposes, ended. In retrospect i think i forgot to get to talking about the implications - whitewashing the music, on one hand, fetishization of "roots" and racialized codification of expertise on another. In other words, i guess my instinct would have been to extend Gilroy's critique of Madness and Bad Manners to the Orange County ska-punk hordes and then drop some Bordieu on the self designated archons of "trad" cultural purity be they in L.A. or New York or whatever, though i suppose Skinnerbox kinda already did that (see "This a New York." I don't know if this is quite fair, since however absent the antiracism of the better two tone bands is in even the most politically committed ska-punk and ska core bands (Mike Park notwithstanding) Operation Ivy (although maybe "Take Warning" functions in much the same way as Gilroy describes "Ghost Town," with interscenester violence standing in for racialized antagonisms) and Against All Authority were a far cry from the imperialist minstrelsy of "Night Boat to Cairo" or Madness's failure to refute its more neo-nazi fans. And what happens if we take "Ska Against Racism" at its word? Or was it already compromised by the erasure of any jamaican referent, by the marketing of the "rude boy/girl" as fashion option rather than shanty town youth outlaw? (Or more precisely the commodification of shanty town youth outlaw as fashion option.)

Oh, by the way, Barack Obama is the president elect of the united states, and that's a good thing for a lot of reasons. And, putting aside the troubling exceptionalism and haste with which many have sought to cast the Obama victory as the redemption of the US from the blood-soaked Bush years and the whole long history of racial violence and subjigation, that a person of African descent will assume the presidency of a nation founded on plantation colonialism in a few short months is certainly more than noteworthy, and Obama's speech, with its deft allusions to Sam Cooke and Dr. King, was powerful for the ways it cast the election not as a culmination but instead as an inception, as a moment in a longerstruggle now inchoate. Such a discursive opening lays forth a wide rang of intriguing possibilities, and I say that as someone who still sort of considers himself an anarchist. But if Larry Summers really gets reappointed to the post of Treasury Secretary, one would have to start seriously questioning the priorities and progressive potential of such an administration. Even though the department of labor's always been compromised, an agent of state corporatist labor policy, it'll be interesting to see whom Obama names to the post. Hope it's someone less Daniel Bellish than Reich. I suppose it's up to us, then, to hold our new chief executive up to his Lincolnian "better angels?"

In the meantime

NYU Roundup

NYU's outsourcing of its cleaning and maintenance workers, it turns out, means that some benefits will be cut, including a reduction in overtime. Some workers are refuisng to sign contracts with the Long Island-based subcontractor.

Kwame Patterson, a spokesman for 32B-J, one of two local unions whose employees have already moved to CBS, said the union hopes NYU reconsiders cutting the benefits.

A document provided to the employees said there would be no changes in pay, seniority and vacation time. The document said job security would increase, noting that if NYU ever downsizes or disposes of a building, employees could move to one of 250 non-NYU buildings CBS maintains.

But employees who have refused to resign with CBS say they worry for their jobs’ security.

“It’s a way for them to legally fire us,” one engineer working in a freshman residence hall said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “NYU really hung us out to dry on this one.”

Meanwhile, Sexton stepped up for his "buddy" Mayor Bloomberg to urge the city council to allow him to run for a third term last week. The blogger at NYULocal suggests reciprocity from the mayor in the university's continuing expansion plans.

NYU outsources its custodial workers to "save costs."

“We found out about this three weeks ago,” an FCM employee at Weinstein residence hall said on the condition of anonymity, since he was not authorized to speak about the situation. “They answered all of our concerns, but it’s not like we had a choice — they told us what’s going to happen, and that was that.”

And the locked out Saigon Grill workers win 4.6 million in back pay and damages.

Bunch of never completed draft posts recently, one a reprise of a long ago reflection on airports as sites of rupture in which a racialized coloniality of power becomes visible, one on the mets, one on the ways liberals and even some on the left have been critiquing the Palinite railing against elites (by poo-pooing class resentment rather than acknowledging it and the genius of the right's political project,) and one on Some Kind of Wonderful as a potential originary moment for hipster metrosexuality. I'm never going to finish them, because none of them were really all that good.

Albuquerque was pretty good. Bought a lot of cheap books. (Newfield and Gordon's edited volume Mapping Multiculturalism and Priscilla Long's 1969 collection on the new left dirt cheap from an awesome used book and record store. And Keywords in American Cultural Studies, Geoff Mann's Our Daily Bread, and Nancy MacLean's The Opening of the American Workplace from the university press displays. I haven't cracked any of them yet, because I'm too busy, but i did read about 150 pages of Alicia Schmidt Camacho's Migrant Imaginaries on various planes and airport stopovers, and it's really great.

quo usque tandem abutere, Zache, patientia nostra

Marc Bousquet has posted video of the interview he did with Andy, Monika, Rana, Steve, and me at last April's Rethinking the University conference in Minneapolis. View it here. Monika has many insightful things to say in the latest installment. I am the fidgety bearded man in the back.

I'm feeling ambivalent yet again about graduate school, about professionalization, about my project, about New York, about the skillsets required to perform the administrative labor of the professoriate, and to play the game of marketing my self and my project as a graduate student, but this will seem like whining to folks not in the academy, and, i am sure, many in it so i will stop there. I believe very much that another university is possible, i'm just not sure i want to stick around and wait for it much longer, and, with teaching, my diss proposal, and my incompletes all weighing on me, i'm not really doing enough to bring it about at the moment. Enough about that.

I'm flying to Aluquerque tomorrow for my first American Studies Association conference. My passport is a mess and i really hope they let me fly on it. Right now i'm sitting here in my apartment preparing to return to planning my lesson for tommorow, wanting to go to sleep, and wanting more to figure out a way to do work that has a very different relationship to institutional logics of exclusion, control, discipline, and privilege. I'd rather be (figuratively) storming woodbridge (not as a return, which is impossible and politically useless, but as a continuing ethic) than sequestering myself in bobst, two floors beneath sexton, revisiting two year old trauma.

Cleaning up my apartment a bit tonight i accidentally ripped my picket sign from the March '03 strike. My superstituos side, the side that had to go to sleep with a stuffed animal into my tweens lest Freddy Krueger murder me in my sleep, feels gnawing anxiety about this. The rest of me feels gnawing anxiety about lots of other things.

My brother is a rock star.

My brother's band, Krallice, just got reviewed in the hipster soaked pages of pitchfork. It's a weird review - usually they don't go this short unless they're panning something, but very favorable, and they even quote Lev saying something silly about Jews listening to satanist neo-nazi norwegian metal bands.

You can view a live performance here and here, but the sound quality is poor, and i encourage folks to go see them live.

Saw this in an email just now, about a strike support rally for Stella d'Oro workers up in Riverdale, (just a few blocks away from my high school.) I'll be in New Mexico next saturday, but for those of you who won't be, why not help support these strikers?

SUPPORT THE STRIKING STELLA D’ORO WORKERS! JOIN US AT THE RALLY ON
OCTOBER 18, 2008 AT 10:00 AM
BROADWAY AND 237TH STREET
#1 train to 238th St. (at Broadway & Van Cortlandt Park South)
MAP http://tinyurl.com/4ehw3v
~~


Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers
International Union Local 50

Historic New York Biscuit Company, Stella D’Oro, Forced on Strike by New Owners, Private Equity Company, Brynwood Partners.

On August 13, 2008, over 135 members of the BCTGM, employed at the historic Stella D’Oro plant in the Bronx, began a job action because of the unreasonable and unethical concessions demanded by the company at the bargaining table. Negotiators for Stella D’Oro, now owned by an out-of-state private equity firm, want to:

~ Eliminate holidays, vacation and sick pay,
~ Slash wages,
~ Impose crushing healthcare premiums, and
~ Do away with Saturday premiums.

BCTGM Local 50 has represented the workers at the Bronx facility since the early 1960’s, and has helped build Stella D’Oro into an American icon. Now an investment company with no ties to New York want to gut the Company and profit from it.
PLEASE HELP STOP ANOTHER NEW YORK INSTITUTION FROM BEING SWEPT ASIDE BY GREEDY CORPORATE INTERESTS! SUPPORT THE STRIKING STELLA D’ORO WORKERS! JOIN US AT THE
RALLY ON OCTOBER 18, 2008 AT 10:AM
BROADWAY AND 237TH STREET __._,_.___

"financial aid" is just work they don't acknowledge

"financial aid" is an interesting term. On an undergraduate level, it often conceals a massive labor system of debt and exploitation - see the fourth chapter of Marc Bousquet's How The University Works, online here. (Doesn't mean we shouldn't absolutely be organizing for it, but we have to do so critically, understanding the fundamental inequalities it doesn't resolve.) At NYU in recent years, the term has also come to stand in and ideologically erase and deny the labor of contingent teachers and researchers, as NYU reorganizes its job structures in anticipation of the possibility of a new NLRB and the Teaching and Research Assistants Collective Bargaining Rights Act.

No longer are we workers, now we are not even "graduate students who teach," but instead "students who recieve financial aid," not workers, but instead the overprivileged welfare queens of the academy, lucky to be here, lucky to be afforded the privilege of doing the "non-work" we are permitted to do.

This strategy on the part of the administration has material effects. This semester the administration has merged fellowship stipend checks and paychecks into the same system. For some reason this led them to put me on a direct deposit program i never authorized, and my last paycheck went to a bank account i don't have. What this ultimately means is that I haven't been paid for a month.

Apparently, we need a union.

damn you, Joey Mcintyre.

That goes for McIntyre, too, who half-jokingly remarked he was abusing the services of their assistant Zach.

I think what i'm struck byt here is how much "Zach" sounds like an adjective to describe a particular kind of 'exotic' service worker.

Staffing the "Global Network University"

In their profile of Bloom, the designated head of the Abu Dhabi campus, raise some of the common questions about the endeavor:

Criticisms of colleges starting campuses or programs in the Middle East often include issues of academic freedom, human rights (in particular in the Emirates, concerns about migrant workers’ rights), and equal access and opportunities for women and Jews.

Lumping these together seems irresponsible to me, since some of the folks who've been loudest on the migrant worker issues have also been concerned with the orientalist assumptions involved in some of the ways gender, homosexuality (not even mentioned here) and Judaism in the middle east are being talked about. Here, the latter prove a smoke screen to allow the administrator-select to avoid discussing the former:

On the latter issue, “I am Jewish, as it is well-known,” Bloom said Monday. “I see the institution as committed to diversity, and that my appointment is emblematic of the diversity to which it is committed.”

“I know that the Abu Dhabi government will make it possible ... for us to include faculty and students from wherever they come.”

Thankfully, IHE also talked to Andrew Ross:

NYU’s Faculty Senators Council chair did not respond to e-mail and voice-mail messages inquiring about Bloom’s selection Monday. Andrew Ross, chair of NYU’s American Association of University Professors chapter and a professor and chair of the department of social and cultural analysis, said he was surprised that someone from outside NYU would be leading the Abu Dhabi branch.

“The way we’ve understood it is that the crown prince of Abu Dhabi wants some kind of facsimile of NYU on site in Abu Dhabi. I guess it would make sense for someone to know the culture of NYU to be in that figurehead position, executive position,” said Ross, who has questioned the motives and assumptions behind the campus and other similar initiatives.

At the same time, Ross continued, “Swarthmore isn’t just any liberal arts college … it’s one that’s known for its open and free speech culture. Surely that’s part of the message.”

“There’s still a widespread skepticism about the project, I would say,” Ross said, surmising that a main reason for the continuing skepticism was that the branch campus was a top-down rather than a faculty-driven endeavor. NYU’s AAUP has been working with Human Rights Watch to draft and push for the adoption of a code of conduct to govern labor practices in the construction and maintenance of the Abu Dhabi campus. The AAUP is also advocating for the establishment of a permanent tenured faculty in Abu Dhabi to safeguard academic freedom.

And interestingly Sexton responds:

“We view the faculty as being exactly the same as faculty we have in New York in all respects,” said Sexton. He said that tenure decisions will be up to individual schools and departments, but expects a significant portion of the Abu Dhabi campus’s faculty to be tenured or tenure-track.

This isn't much of an answer, though, because he's not telling us whether the faculty from the middle east and south asia who are not part of the Washington Square Campus's tenure(less) system will be able to earn tenure at NYU Abu Dhabi - the "significant portion" here could easily be a reference to the NYU faculty Sexton wants to serve "tours of duty" at the A.D. Institute. And there's no commitment here to ensure just working and living conditions for the migrant workers who'll build and staff the new campus. For more on the campaign to get NYu to commit to fair labor at branch campuses, check out the Coalition for Fair Labor at NYU, sign the petition, and be on the lookout for upcoming events.

sigh

NYU's student newspaper continues its now apparently protracted polemics against a single student activist group targeted last week by President Sexton by informing all of us that real activism involves a little studying and then asking the "proper people" in the administration nicely. How tragic for the 25 GSOCers whom the administration fired and blacklisted that we were not privy to such brilliant advice three years ago when we most needed it. How helpful it is to have a campus newspaper that blithely echoes administration talking points in poorly orchestrated, poorly articulated, and poorly informed attacks on student activists. The Washington Square News is well aware - or should be - that SCRC, for instance, has been attempting to "productively engage" the administration for much of the last two semesters. The administration's silence on budget disclosure has more to do with their refusal to afford undergraduates (much less graduate employees now repeatedly branded "financial aid recipients") a seat at the table. (A table, by the way, which i would like to see thrown out entirely in favor of more just, more radical, if you will, overhaul of what it means to be a university, a student, a teacher. This, of course, is a concept the WSN refuses to even entertain, for it is surely too impractical for John Sexton and thus for them, too steeped in the "outdated" activism of, like, Cesar Chavez. And Gandhi. Fuck those guys. Sustainable tacos are so much more worthwhile.)

Ok, that last bit came off as kind of obnoxious. The speed with which administrators adopt green capitalism as the epitome of 'responsible' activism has always horrified me, but I don't mean to disparage the very commendable efforts of student activists to institutionalize environmentalist practices even in the most neoliberal of institutional spaces.

In other NYU news, Sexton has lured the sitting president of Swarthmore College to be the head of the NYU Abu Dhabi adventure, and the endowment, flush with donations from rich alumni and the labor of thousands of contingent academics has reached 2.5 billion dollars. Clearly, it's time to buy a new luxury condominium building, because who needs financial aid, anyway?

addendum,

except the liner notes to the Tim remaster tell us that Westerberg wrote "Waitress in the Sky" about his sister, a flight attendant, from the point of view of an asshole customer. While the subtlety of wit may be lost on listeners and critics alike, who've long panned the song as sounding like grade a rock star idiocy, i wonder if we have to read it differently with this familial intimacy in mind...

Alright, that's the last I'll have to say about Paul Westerberg for a while, barring a new album, another reunion, or me actually ever buying Don't Tell a Soul and/or All Shook Down

and sometimes i just ain't in the mood to take my place in back with the loudmouths

So i got those remastered versions of Tim and Pleased to Meet Me today. I was somewhat skeptical about the need for remasters on the twin tone cds. They always sounded perfect to me as is, and the graininess of the earlier CD mixes of Let It Be in particular felt more appropriate to what the album is and is trying to do than the remaster, which gave certain songs a vh1-y feel. But Pleased to Meet Me always sounded terrible on CD - distant, muted, brackish. I'm listening to the remaster now, and the songs that always sounded great sound better - those horns on "Can't Hardly Wait," for instance, now evoke the Memphis soul they were supposed to rather than Huey Lewis and the News, and i can hear subtleties of the guitar riff on "Alex Chilton" that I can't on the original CD version. The songs i usually skip on the album also sound better - "The Ledge" is explosive now, and the lyrics of "Shooting Dirty Pool"'s first verse are now almost comprehensible. "Nightclub Jitters" sounds hte most radically different - the remaster brings the bass way up, and it almost sounds like Sinatra meets Portishead or something.

Tim sounds mostly the same to me, and for me, that's a good thing. I've never had any problem with Tommy Erdelyi's production on that CD. One thing the remaster does is make Left of the Dial slightly cleaner, but not so much that it doesn't sound like what it is, a paean to the 1980s 'alternative' scene. At any rate, "Bastards of Young" and "Here Comes A Regular" sound as good as always, just a little louder, and I'm fine with that. Between them, the two discs have four different versions of "Can't Hardly Wait," one acoustic (which doesn't really work at all), with three different versions of the lyrics. The "Studio Demo" of "Kiss Me on the Bus" has Dinosaur Jr. levels of distorted guitar. "Nowhere is my home," an unreleased track from the Tim sessions, shows how great a guitarist Bob Stinson could be. Pleased to Meet Me has TEN bonus tracks. Some of the unreleased stuff, like "Birthday gal" and the incredible "photo," whose pre-chorus is awesomely reminiscent of Blue Oyster Cult's "burnin' for you," are wonderful. Chris Mars's take on "Cool Water" anticipates Cool Dump (and predates it by two decades.)

My three day-long stint in post-nasal hell caught up with me in the classroom today. It wasn't that I was underprepared so much as that my brain wasn't making the connections i wanted it to, that I just kind of blanked on where I wanted class to go and about a third of the connections i wanted to push people to make. Which sucks, because it was an important week in terms of the readings -- racialized domestic work. emotional labor. affect. Grr. Bobst Library is much more fun at 7 AM.

Mets are currently down 5 to 1 in the eighth. Here's hoping they pull out of it...

\EDIT: in lieu of Arlie Russel Hochschild's work and following Kathleen Barry's own work on flight attendant labor, i should note that "Waitress in the Sky" is an obnoxious, bad, and offensive song from a guy who once expressed admiration of ronal dreagan and said some dumb shit about Vietnam but writes (mostly) amazing songs.

Case in point: "Swingin' Party"

Reason #347 Why Pitchfork Sucks

No way is Pleased to Meet Me a better album than Tim!

The former has four great songs and a lot of mediocre ones. The latter has three terrible songs and a lot of great ones. I love them both, but the idea that "One good dose of thunder" cancels out "here comes a regular" seems suspect..., as does the fact that an album that sounds as canned and as crappy as Pleased to Meet Me sometimes did (although i have not yet heard the reissue) could be the one cited as having better sound.

Also, it's kind of amazing that six plus years on, there's still a UOC for the YDN to complain about.

on embracing change, pt II

omg.

I've been meaning to blog about this and this and this. Unfortunately, i'm swamped and sick, and i don't know when i'll get around to it. So let me instead briefly commemorate this, which happened six years ago today, and which i have been thinking about even through my post-nasal drip haze. That was a little too graphic and doesn't do justice what the movement did that day and in the years since. Not much can, which is why all the media accounts of that action, particularly the snarky one in the NYT to which i will not link here, completely misunderstood what was at stake and what was going on.

Back to preparing for tomorrow's sections, in which we'll discuss racialized and gendered service work and affective and emotional labor in Mary Romero's Maid in the USA, Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo's Domestica, Robin Leidner's Fast Food Fast Talk, and Arlie Russell Hochschild's The Managed Heart.

Seriously?

The hysteria over policing faculty politics has clearly gone way too far. (Not that there's anything new about that.)

(Can we talk about the fact that they are quoting in their mission statement a former university president who was so reactionary and incompetrent that a faculty as complacent, self-satisfied, and conservatiove as Yale's actually forced his ouster? Ok, back to the real story)

Sporting an Obama or McCain button? Driving a car with one of the campaigns’ bumper stickers? You might need to be careful on University of Illinois campuses.

The university system’s ethics office sent a notice to all employees, including faculty members, telling them that they could not wear political buttons on campus or feature bumper stickers on cars parked in campus lots unless the messages on those buttons and stickers was strictly nonpartisan. In addition, professors were told that they could not attend political rallies on campuses if those rallies express support for a candidate or political party.

kinda ironic...

... that a scandal about an imaginary graduate assistant would pop up in a "public labor relations course.

That's really all I have to say about this.

change is sooo in right now.

no comment?

Oh, by the way

I'm not sure if anyone's reading, but i'm blogging again. I've got a pretty big workoad this semester, but i'll try to update regularly. Post comments and critiques, or send subpoenas.

social entrepreneurship?

The first in the speaker series endowned by Catherine B. Reynolds, NYU Trustee for Life, student debt profiteer (I'd link, but the WSN site is down,) and purveyor of a $50,000 scholarship to the guy who's responsible for our company union debacle, is none other than (drumroll)

Union-busting anti-union ideologue Whole Foods CEO John Mackey!!!11!1??!1!

That's the NYU vision of social change right there.

Rat, commodified

The most bizarre moment of the GSOC strike was when a group of "counter-protestors" (actually actors hired by an advertising agency) set up a huge inflatable businessman in Washington Square Park, along with a nice, cuddly inflatable rat to protest the UAW's fangy, menacing protest rat. Wearing t-shirts and equipped with a web site that called on passersby and strikers alike to respect rodentia, and attempting to rebrand the rat as the "great pointed archer," (initials GPA. Get it? I just did...) threatened by villainous human supremacist trade unions, these ad agencies used our strike for some free publicity. The whole thing came out in MetroNY the next day. This was really my first interaction with an attempt to commodify the symbols of labor insurgency, other than asshole Yale undergrads wearing picket signs to frat halloween parties, and it's what came to mind immediately when I saw this in my subway station this morning.Yeah, that's an HSBC ad. the text beneath the photos reads "Different Values Make The World a Richer Place" You take the people pissed off at finance capital and you turn them into an advertisement for finance capital. Brilliant.

EDIT: Unless I'm being stupid and this is some culture jam a la adbusters, which would make some sense, but also points to how easily those tactics are incorporated into actual corporate strategies.

EDIT 2: Nope, it really is an HSBC ad. Incredible.

On strike for part-timers in Canada

The chroned news blog reports that faculty and librarians are on strike at the University of Windsor.

The union says it is fighting for more money for part-time faculty members, saying they receive the lowest wages in Ontario, according to The Windsor Star. Other issues include salary, teaching standards and concerns over the university’s attempts to introduce “instructional teachers,” who have less experience and, in many case, less-advanced degrees than the current faculty. The union believes such teachers would have a negative impact on teaching, research, and graduate programs. The faculty voted 96 percent in favor of today’s strike.

dispatches

"Pure maths be damned." The Washington Square News reports on the Courant Institute's ties (the Math department, specifically) to Wall Street, through fields like financial math and programs to train PhDs in the kind of mathematics valued by money managers. By the way, capitalism appears to be in crisis - though that didn't stop Yale's endowment from growing. At whose expense this time, we wonder...

(Wouldn't it be nice to have similar data on NYU...?

parker brothers meet baran and sweezy meet jackson lewis

All down Tillary street, down Jay street, down the Flatbush Avenue extension, lamp-posts are festooned with bright purple paeans to the newly-merged NYU-Polytechnic Institute, or, as the banners proclaim it, NYU-Poly. Except it's all in lowercase, and you can't really see the hyphen. So, as the most wise Noah observed when we both first noticed them, it looks like, and perhaps is ultoimately the case, that what Sexton's PR flacks are proclaiming is nyupoly, like monopoly, but putatively in the public service and now with 100% more purple and sketchy hugs.

Nyupoly. It's a ideology for growth - urban development, (real estate speculation, state entitlements for neoliberal corporate privatizers masquerading as 501c3,) university expansion (bust-buy-bust,) and it's a brand, as evinced by all those purple banners.

And so time moves on at NYU. We get mass emails describing graduate employees as "students on financial aid," blithely denying, erasing our labor. We get triumphalist updates on the coming venture in Abu Dhabi. Snide non-apologies for the constant meteoric increases in undergraduate tuition, and nary a word - at least to the graduate students thus far - about the administrative restructuring Sexton and Alfano decreed last year. Presumably that conversation, like all the others here, is "over;" the NYUpoly has spoken and the rest of us are consigned to wait and see what happens, or participate in some sham spectacle of empty gesticulations toward a mockery of democratic and collegial affairs, which have never really ruled in the university at all. So we wait, and we organize, and all around us the Nyupoly explodes outward. I cut my activist teeth, however ineffectual they were then, in high school, at the multitude of anti-police brutality marches in the wake of Louima's rape and Diallo's murder. "Whose Streets," we'd ask? The answer then was always "our streets," asserting a collective ownership of the city by people whose place in the disneyfied corporate amusement park NY was becoming was fundamentally under attack. I think we lost that fight, at least in NY, and I wonder if the answer to that question must not now be a far bleaker one.

(This post has been appended to since it was originally published.)

There's probably an essay to be written somewhere about what exactly is going on here. Academe? Hasids? Chimpanzees in Red Sox Jerseys? Hasids drumming? Grayscale flashbacks?

Alison Richard, universities, and social justice

As provost of Yale University for the first eight or nine years of Richard Levin's presidency, Alison Richard, an anthropologist by discipline, actively fought the attempts by Yale TAs and research assistants to win union recognititon and negotiate with the university. At worst, this was complicity with the multiple administrative harassment and intimidation campaigns which were promoted by the administration and often prosecuted by an all too willing tenured professoriat. At best we might imagine Richard a mere ideologue of a university with close relationships to "the marketplace" (scroll down) but to which collective organizations of employees were nonetheless anathema. (See pages 11-12.)

It shouldn't really surprise anyone, then, that Richard has recently come under fire for remarks asserting that the prosperity of universities depends in part on their autonomy from the demands of social justice movements.

The quality of what we provide and our capacity to attract talent are both at risk. Ironically, in my view one of the greatest risks is driven by the growing appreciation of the relevance of universities, in many ways so welcome: the problem is that the conception of relevance is often narrow while the fact of relevance encourages meddling. As institutions charged with education, research and training, our purpose is not to be construed as that of handmaidens of industry, implementers of the skills agenda, or indeed engines for promoting social justice. Responsive to and helping shape the national policy context, we need the independence and autonomy to chart our individual institutional courses, and to experiment.

Maybe Richard is right. Maybe the sort of "business-facing" institution she here asserts that Cambridge is can't afford to worry about such things, though not even Richard's former colleagues Richard Brodhead and Richard Levin would go so far in public - all that rhetoric about training leaders is, after all, an elitist neoliberal version of a theory of the university's role in promoting social justice, or at least "progress" in managerial and corporate terms. But really I think this invites us to do two things - one, to recoil at the "leadership" that universities like Yale are exporting all over the world in the form of academic administrators like Richard, Andrew Hamilton at Oxford, Susan Hockfield at M.I.T., Brodhead at Duke, etc., as well as in the form of politicians it trains - neoconservatives like Ashcroft and Bush, and neoliberals like the Clintons and so many others, and protofascist journalists of multiple generations. Two, i think we should take Richard's remarks as an occasion to reflect upon what new university we might bring to birth from the ashes of the old (campus,) what a university that is indeed an engine for promoting real social justice might look like, if such a thing is indeed possible (and I think it is.)

"This election is not about issues, This election is about a composite view of what people take away from these candidates" is the new ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

It's the "you smell like shoe polish" school of direct action.

"...how we do things downtown."

I'm late getting to this, but ROC-NY has won big in its years-long struggle against managerial tip-stealing and racism at Fireman restauraunts. This is a big deal because ROC-NY is one of the organizations at the forefront of the workers' center movement that was and remains so central to the immigrant worker labor movement that took the mainstream media and the streets of cities across the country by storm two years ago.

I haven't been blogging too much about what this blog purports to be about, mostly because it's summer break, I'm still in post-exam vacation mode, and watching massive amounts of Deadwood, which has, by my count, employed all seven of the words the late George Carlin told us could not be said on television, and then some. I have also watched a lot of movies, some on my ipod, some in the theatre. Be Kind Rewind and There Will Be Blood were the best of these, the former had me laughing uproariously at my computer screen at six in the morning, while the latter makes me want to go out and read the Upton Sinclair novel on which it's based. I'm interested in what Be Kind Rewind has to say about a politics of history - the history Mike and Jerry remake, the history of the films they 'swede' ("anything you say can and will be held against you in a court of robocop") but also the history of Passaic, New Jersey, of its great textile strike ("Passaic means class struggle") and of the projects into which Danny Glover's Mr. Fletcher is relocated at the film's close. Mia Farrow's character suggests a radical populism inherent to this postmodern selective/fictive reinterpretation of text and event, but the political possibilities of this kind of play, the film seems to suggest, are fleeting.

Iron Man was one of the better Marvel Comics movies, up there with the second Spider-Man film and maybe X2: X-Men United as the best of a bunch which includes the unwatchable Tom Jane Punisher remake (Dolph Lungren now keeping himself busy as a VH1 nostalgia show talking head), the execrable Daredevil, and its seque Elektra, whose existence escapes reason, as well as the crass Fantastic Four franchise. (Joel Schumacher Batman installments and Catwoman aside, DC's been much better at this sort of thing lately - Superman Returns was great, and while i didn't get much out of Batman Begins, it was certainly better than, say the Brett Ratner X-Men 3 crapfest.) When Iron Man came out back in May there was a great deal of hubbub about the critique of war profiteering and then backlash "it's not really a very strong critique" in response. The critique is somewhat limited, but even if Stain's double-dealing offers an easy way out of the conundrum, the film does highlight some interesting questions raised by corporate R&D and its relationship to the war state in an old-school, Eisenhower "Military Industrial Complex" manner (rather than a new school, Jeremy Scahill, labor subcontracting, Blackwater etc. one.) I do think that the ghostface killah cameo would have made more sense in this film than it does in Walk Hard, which I enjoyed mostly because of the 3 seconds of Martin Starr's Yiddish accent. Semi-Pro was pretty bad. Cloverfield was a boring landscape of gentrified, yuppie Manhattan in crisis. Charlie Wilson's War combined Aaron Sorkin's usual preachy liberalism with a worldview even more neocolonial than usual. Kung Fu Panda was OK. I like how they never explain why his father's a goose. No Country for Old Men was interesting. Breach was boring despite Chris Cooper, and Ryan Phillipe can't act. I don't remember what else I watched.

I've started walking again, and organizing again, and in general I'm enjoying being done with my exams and will soon move on to my incompletes and my dissertation proposal. Sigh.

random, but awesome.

random ten

Dino Perkins - "Skin Him Alive"

O.V. Wright, "Drowning on Dry Land."

The Four Mints. "You're My Desire"

Wu-Tang Clan Feat. Sunny Valentine & Tashmahogany, "Starter." from 8 Diagrams. I guess this is what people mean when they call this album "weird" or "psychadelic."

Journey - "any way you want it". Somewhere in my private corners of the internet i have a rewrite of this song ready to go, waiting for the right time. I haven't looked at it in almost two years though, and it's not as good as some of my other work. Anyway this song is not as good as, say, "Lights," or "Separate Ways (Worlds Apart,)" but it has a certain charm.

The Box Tops - "The Letter." Hard to believe that's Alex Chilton at like age 16.

The Chosen Few - "People Make The World Go Round" - one of at least three reggae covers I know of. This one's got crazy falsetto. I think I like Hortense Ellis's cover better. The backing vocals here are also a bit out of step with the song's meaning.

Swell Maps - "Robot Factory."

Weather Report - "Teen Town."

Miles Davis - "Bitches Brew."

Salt of the scholarly journal

The new American Quarterly, which just showed up in my mailbox, features on its covetr two images from the best movie ever, The Salt of the Earth (Revueltas's Esperanza in Jail and Chacon's Ramon blurred and out of focus,) and what looks to be a pretty interesting essay on the film by Benjamin Balthaser. Sweet.

So what, to my eyes, which are mostly ignorant of the particularities of Canadian Labor Law, seems like the Canadian equivalent of binding arbitration in the U.S., except the workers actually get to vote on whether or not to accept the proposed settlement, has produced a potential settlement to the T.A. strike at McGill, though again the union actually gets to vote on whether or not this is good enough to stop striking for. For what it's worth, the text on the AGSEM website seems guardedly optimistic

further adventures in sampling.

The Stylistics' "People Make The World Go Round."

Here's EPMD's "Ride the Bozack - one of two songs on the same LP to sample the Stylistics's original recording. (The other is "It Wasn't Me, It Was The Fame.")


Here's Hortense Ellis's great reggae version. Unfortunately the audio sucks. You can find it on iTunes with Hortense's brother Alton Ellis listed as the artist.



Okay. Here's Freddie Hubard's take.

and here's Pete Rock and C.L. Smooth's "Mecca and the Soul Brother", which samples the latter.

And there's Blackalicious's "Swan Lake," which samples the Hubbard as well as two other version not on youtube. (Milt Jackson and O'Donel Levy)



and here's Ramsey Lewis's rather lame smooth jazz version, which was apparently sampled by sage francis

via inside higher ed.

• The magazine Radar has just published a series of transcripts designed to show how the children of the rich and famous are catered to, even if they don’t deserve special treatment. The magazine had a writer pose as an assistant to various wealthy people, calling on behalf of their fictional offspring to see whether they would receive favorable treatment in landing a Congressional internship, or a book contract or ... some assistance from Wesleyan University’s admissions office. For lucky Wesleyan, the magazine posed as someone calling on behalf of Jake Quiznos, the (imaginary) heir to the Quiznos sub empire. When Jake’s representative tells the (unnamed) Wesleyan official that he’d like privacy on his tour, he’s assured that he can have a private tour by an admissions official who notes that “when Mr. Spielberg came to visit, I gave him the tour myself.” The admissions official says he’ll try to get time for Jake with the university’s president (possibly to discuss donations), and reassures Jake’s aide that the young Quiznos will have no problem finding vegan food on campus. Naturally, the Quiznos heir needed reassurance that he wouldn’t encounter a Subway on campus, and receives it. The Wesleyan official doesn’t appear concerned after being told of Jake’s low SAT scores (at least for Wesleyan), low grades, or “some shoplifting issues” that Jake’s assistant says are definitely in the past and are now just the subject of Jake’s poetry. Says the Wesleyan admissions official of these qualities: “I don’t think they necessarily disqualify him off the bat. Is this someone who’s able to show redemption? The admissions process is a very holistic process. We look at you from your grades to your recommendations to what you’ve shown that you’re capable of doing. We don’t see it as a one-factor kind of thing.” Asked about the magazine’s feature, a spokesman for Wesleyan told Inside Higher Ed Wednesday that the person who spoke to Radar was someone in the admissions office but declined to say who. The spokesman said that the person suspected the call might be a joke and “didn’t want to be rude” in his answers.

Meritocracy indeed.

Ah, racial politics.

Tom Schaller at Tapped

And it is historic, no doubt. What I'm about to say is not meant in any way to diminish the significance of his nomination. However, and without wading too deeply into all the complex issues of racial identity, it must be said that Obama is not exactly your average African American politician—and I’m not just referring here to his unique rhetorical skills.

Yes, yes, we know, he's so clean and articulate! Joe Biden much?

What I mean is that his ascendancy also marks an historical departure from African American politics itself. As just a starter list, there are at least five ways that he is different:

First, he is half-black and, consequently, light-skinned. Second, his black half is Continental African and more recent in its migration to America, through his father, as compared to slave-descendant and centuries-old in its genealogical origins. Third, he does not come from a clerical background, the occupation which (especially prior to the civil rights movement) was responsible for producing a disproportionate number of black leaders. Fourth, though he later became a Southside Chicago organizer, his upbringing was middle-class Midwestern, not underclass and urban. And, finally, Obama is Ivy League-educated, as opposed to a product from an historically black college.

There are American black leaders who share many of these biographical characteristics, and a few who may fit all five. (Quick quiz: Can you name even one other?) But there are not many, and certainly none who reached the political summit Obama did yesterday. And that, I would submit, is no coincidence.

"African American Politics" seems rather circumscribed here, no?

Home Stretch

I figured i'd do another quick post of some youtube videos. This time, I give you Ann Peebles' "Trouble Heartaches and Sadness," one of my favorite songs, which I discovered on a greatest hits compilation that was an impulse buy a few years ago. I realized today though that one of the reasons the song was eerily familiar was that I'd heard snippets of it before...

Ann Peebles, "Trouble, Heartaches, and Sadness," 1972

Genius/GZA, "Shadowboxin'" 1995

RZA as Bobby Digital, "Throw Your Flag Up." 2001