"...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

more youtube procrastination

(Marlena Shaw, "Woman of the Ghetto")

(Phyllis Dillon's version of the same song, which I grew up with via an old Heartbeat/Studio One comp i bought when I was fifteen.)

(Ken Boothe and Stranger Cole, "Arte Bella."

(Prince Buster, "Shaking Up Orange Street.")

ack

Last night i realized that word was counting footnotes in the word count, and I dropped from 7,000-something to 5300, which is scary, because it means i hadn't gotten as much done as I thought I had, but also potentially helpful because it means I still have a lot of space to expand and add in the next 29 or so hours. Oy.

more cool stuff from youtube.

Some Roots-era Mayfield...


Mary Timony Band's "Sharpshooter" (2007)

And finally,

serendipity.

In the process of trying in vain to track down an old article from the Yale student publication The New Journal on the 13 latino replacement workers who joined the September 2003 picket lines, I came across a scholarly article on the '84 strike that I'd never heard of before - Pushkala Prasad's "Organizing Culture in a Union," from the Journal of Applied Behavioral Sciences, 1991. I guess the reason I hadn't come across the article before is that it's disciplinary sociology, which is not where I'd locate my own research methods, and it came out significantly later than most of the scholarly literature on the strike, from Herbert Janick's "Yale Blue" to Molly Ladd-Taylor's "Women Workers and the Yale Strike" and Linda Anderson''s article in Fronteirs to On Strike For Respect. By 1991, GESO had already struck once.

But Prasad's article's pretty interesting. There's a discussion of tensions between HERE officials and strikers over whether singing on the picket line removes focus from the economic issues, which is fascinating. And the early 90s social constructivism approach does interesting work to resolve some of the questions Josh Eidelson raised in an excellent term paper he wrote about the strike a million years ago and was nice enough to share with me when I was doing some research on the clerical worker labor movement shortly less than a million years ago.

Back to work.