The LA Times has a story today on UCLA's hospital, which, the story suggests, may be giving liver transplants to members of Japanese organized crime syndicates in exchange for large donations. There's much in this that's disturbing, not the least of which is the orientalist frame in which the reporter casts his subjects - "ruthless," etc. (Goto as Togo?) and the undercurrent of economic nationalism which is present in the story and explodes into fullblown white racism at times during the comments.

Not that I think the university and the state get off the hook for this. When millions have no health care coverage, even if the donations are being put to good use, there's no defending a system which allows those with money to receive care and leaves the fates of those without money to chance (and a slim one at that.) None of whihc is to argue that the technologies of medical knowledge are always a good or progressive thing or that forms of care are not themselves implicated in the logics of power and the strategies of managing populations we take to be normal.
(I have no idea who did this or what they were trying to do, but i recognize the text - it's the last few sentences of Hardt and Negri's Empire.)

The first time i heard this song (at a party on a mix a friend had made) it totally shocked me. It's one of the wierdest Philly soul songs i've heard - though i'm no expert.

Anyway if you're unfamiliar with the Three Degrees, who were one of the more well known girl groups of the 70's, this video should help somewhat:

In which it has been good to know you (for the most part)

I didn't get as much done today as I'd like, but did manage to wrap my brain around Clyde Barrow's arguments in Universities and The Capitalist State, which is a rather interesting book. I'm not yet completely stir crazy from not having interacted with another human being for more than the few seconds it takes to ring up a cash register (excepting picking up my exam question tuesday evening,) and my brother's frequent Mets related text messages help prolong the inevitable, even when he's informing me of Aaron Heilman's latest collapse (for which the media will no doubt blame Carlos Delgado's postcolonial antipatriotism) rather than ,oh, I don't know, Oliver Perez pitching a perfect game or something similarly implausible.

I have a sinking feeling my examiners are not going to like the way I've organized my exam, that I have considerable surgery to perform. I have the time to do so if I must, i suppose.

procrastinare semper

A couple things as i work through my exam - i wrote three thousand words on Wednesday and about 1800 since. I like what i've written, but i'm not sure if it's exam-ish enough.

First, in response to Alyssa's contention that Indiana Jones and Star Wars are no places to look for political praxis, I want to agree and renew my suggestion that we instead look towards Buffy. Here I am speaking not only of season 4 (Smash the corporate/military/demonic university!) btu also season three, for blowing up (metaphorically) the schools and the giant snakes inside them seems a fairly accurate representation of my political and academic projects over the past nine years (since the founding of the Fieldston Revolutionary Anarchist Collective of Activist Students (FRACAS).) Graduation Day pts 1. and 2., like much of Season 7, are about organizing, about making connections, about challenging folks, pushing folks, about mass armed uprisings at scholastic graduations. Err, um, scratch the last part? And for any FBI, i reaffirm my commitment to bourgie ass nonviolent direct action blah blah blah.

Second, it's friday. Random shuffle: (from a new ipod i haven't burned all my cd collection onto yet. (I go to 20 because i haven't done this in a while)

1. Som Nosso, "Pra Swingar," from Baile Funk 1: The Brazilian Beat Mix.

2. Moldy Peaches "Anyone else but you." From The Moldy Peaches. Enh.

3.The Fatback Band, "Backstrokin' ," from Hustle! The Ultimate Fatback 1969-1984

4.Crass, "Bloody Revolutions" from Best Before 1984

5. Dead Kennedys. "Stealing People's Mail." from Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables (and i only just got the joke in the album title now, after owning it for god knows how long.)

6. The Coup, "ShoYoAss." from Pick A Bigger Weapon. Best song on the album by far.

7. Bob Marley, "Downpressor" from The Complete Bob Marley & The Wailers 1967-1972 Part 2
Actually Peter Tosh singing on this dub version, not surprisingly, since it's his song.

8.Grant McLennan, "Lighting Fires" from Intermission Great song. Requiescat in pace.

9.Little Milton "More &More". From Chicago Soul: Electric Blues Funk & Soul

10. Milton Nascimento, "Saidas E Bandeiras," from Clube Moderno Esquina Do Mundo (Scroll Down)

11. The Beatles - "I'm Only Sleeping." from Revolver.

12. The Dramatics - "In The Rain." from Stax 50th Anniversary Celebration and like twelve billion other compilations.

13. Robert Zimmerman. "A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall." From The Freewheelin Bob Dylan.

14. Exploding Hearts - "Boulevard Trash," from Guitar Romantic

15, Laura Lee. "Mama's Got a Good Thing." from Chicago Soul: Electric Blues Funk & Soul

16. The Moovers "I love you baby," from Eccentric Soul: The Deep City Label

17. The (International) Noise Conspiracy: "The Way I Feel About You" from Armed Love

18. Us, "Let's Do It Today" from Midwest Funk: Funk 45s from Tornado Alley

19. Fela Kuti, "Zombie" from Zombie

20. I-Roy, "Look a Boom" from Don't Check Me With No Lightweight Stuff

The Mets, Briefly

The amount of vitriol heaped on Willie Randolph for speculating that some of the vitriol directed at him by the media might be racially motivated is ridiculous. Of course some of it's racially motivated. Ever since Minaya and Randolph took over, the more racist section of sports media have routinely racialized the Mets' roster and managerial decisions. "Omar wants an all-latino team," etc. Billy Wagner and Paul Lo Duca's clubhouse outbursts to the media have not helped matters.

So maybe the fact that the mets suck right now is Randolph's fault. Maybe it's Minaya's, who traded away promising young players like Brian Bannister, Jeff Keppinger, Henry Owens, Matt Lindstrom, Heath Bell, etc for scraps the mets aren't using. But the mob of reporters sounding the Willie Randolph deathwatch can't be helping anyone play better baseball. Maybe it's Randolph's job to offset that, but none of this makes that any easier to do.

EDIT: Peter Gammons gets it right.

twee pregnancies and postindustrializing racializations of space

As with most things, I'm about five months late with this, but I finally saw Juno tonight. My reactions follow, though it's narcissistic of me to assume that anyone would care at this point.

My parents loved the movie, my great aunt thought it was anti-abortion (but never saw it), and my own reaction falls in with the ambivalent chorus that my own age cohort seems to have with the movie. I do think it's a bit anti-abortion, moreso even than Knocked Up and the whole "shmushmortion" claptrap that actually merited column space in,like, the New York Times and The Nation. But then I've never actually been in an abortion clinic, so maybe barely post-pubescent goths do regale patients with tales of their boyfriend's grape penis and anti-abortion protesters engage potential aborters in well meaning conversations about fingernails rather than shouting threats and physically accosting them, cause, you know, that sort of thing only happens in movies. Like Dogma. Or not.

The twee-ness of the dialogue, and really therefore the uber-reliance on commodity fetishism (The Stooges, Sonic Youth, Orange tic tacs, blue slurpees, Kimya Dawson) in lieu of meaningful character development is either a really profound comment on postmodern aporia or just really lazy, probably both. And it's weird to see a song I got over quickly when i first heard it like six years ago treated as if it were the most profound piece of music in a film since John Cusack's boom-box discovered "Within Your Reach," which was the real star of Say Anything, not that Peter Gabriel song. I've always felt, since i first saw them at one of the Sideway anti-folk nights (I'd gone to see Sam play) that the moldy peaches were good, but not great, fun but hardly world altering, and this seems to be the kind of intervention the film wants to make too, just in a much more pretentious, Wes Andersonny kind of way.

Let me also add, on a totally unrelated note, that while I have not yet read, but look forward to reading Mandi Isaacs Jackson's new book about New Haven in the 1960s and 70s, Model City Blues, I have read an earlier essay Jackson (who i've known for about six years) wrote on the subject and I've done a good amount of research on the period (for my senior essay, which looked at the years between 1968 and 1971) and Paul Bass's review in New Haven Independent, which posits Bass collaborator Doug Rae as paragon of multivocality and textual democracy, is a bit problematic. Some of Bass's criticisms may be justified - I haven't read the book yet, but what I have read and my own knowledge of New Haven history leads me to be skeptical of some of the more pointed allegations Bass makes of Jackson's alleged historiographical failures, which would be strengthened if Bass were willing to discuss the actual text beyond offering a scarequote here or there. Though we need to be skeptical of the idea that people are organically speaking for themselves when interviewed by an academic or journalist - speech is always mediated - Bass might be right that there may be value in talking to more people than he accuses Jackson of doing. Again i don't yet know enough to form an opinion. But that doesn't, i think, invalidate the way Jackson reads the archive that she works with, the way she finds traces of a very real subaltern resistance (Hill Parents Association, anyone?) to the New Haven planner state in file photos and newspaper articles, for instance. Bass's claim that the fact that Jackson only interviews seven people means that her massive archival work is somehow flawed is thus specious. This is not an adequate lens by which to evaluate Jackson's project and/or its viability.

Bass's takedown really seems to unravel, though around his offering up of Rae as paragon of scholarly virtue - Rae whose investment in the actions of planners (ordinary people appear anecdotally and occupy a decidedly subaltern position in Rae's text, which tows orthodox lines on all matters of New Haven political history - Lee flawed, Panthers bad, John Daniels happy ending, Levin era implicit new epoch in Yale's investment in city though analysis of university's role largely absent from book despite G. William Domhoff's urges to the contrary) erases much if not all of the history Jackson treats on, almost completely ignores any popular involvement in the conversation around the city's future in favor of the narrative of heroically flawed planners. Rae's book - and i will admit it's been a few years since i read it, seemed to me far more invested in taking arrogant potshots at the left than in adequately answering the questions Jackson's work does deal with - the untold stories of urban redesign, the fraught and contested histories of racialized urban space, and the ways in which such spaces are shaped and reshaped not only by the Doug Raes of the world, but also the movements that Rae largely dismisses, ignores, or pathologizes in his own text. (Rae's hostility towards, for instance, the FHUE that Bass namedrops and that Jackson has been involved with for nearly a decade, is well known.) There's far more value in such a project than what Bass, despite his pointed references here to FHUE's complex tactical frames, seems, of late, willing to admit.

I feel a little weird posting this having not yet read Jackson's book (i just ordered a copy this morning,) so I'll stop there and maybe I'll post more later after I've finished reading it. But let me end with a question: does the fact that, say, Vinnie Sirabella was a backer/booster of Richard Lee's renewal programs really invalidate what i am sure is a very smart account of movements against said transformations or for a different kind of city if the author of such a history is a product of a political legacy which unites that opposition with the unions Sirabella helmed? That is what I take to be Bass's overriding argument, and it's unsatisfying.

I'm sick, and have been for since saturday, but I managed to write two papers in that time, one of which didn't completely suck. Assuming I get through my exam, whenever it winds up being, this may be the only year so far of graduate school that I finish without racking up an incomplete. I'm moderately proud of that.

So I'll start blogging more soon, particularly post-exam as i start working on aforementioned incompletes and researching my dissertation proposal, and you can expect a post soon about what's going on at University of Chicago, but for now I feel compelled simply to lament the defunctity of YaleInsider, particularly at a moment when it is so sorely needed.

After more than two weeks, the sit-in at UNC Chapel Hill ends in arrests and repression , as University administrators refuse to sign the DSP. See here and here

Happy May Day

That's GEO/University of Michigan organizers celebrating their contract victory after a one day strike earlier this semester. I stole it from Youtube.

Here's another one, which takes us from Lawrence 1912, Joe Hill, Lucy Parsons, through the 1934 San Francisco longshoremen's strike, up to Cesar Chavez and the Delano Grape Boycott.


And some footage of the 2006 LA May Day March...: