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