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.
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