Much to blog about - Obama's appointment of Brown Decision dissenter Wilma Liebman to the chair position of the NLRB, power struggles in the two most dynamic labor unions in the U.S., and much less important, the conclusion of Grant Morrison's Final Crisis, but i don't really have time to write about any of these things right now and instead i will leave you with a list of songs randomly compiled by my ipod.

The temptations - "since i lost my baby"

woody guthrie - "talking fishing blues"

NaS - "Project Roach (ft Last Poets)"

Sleater-Kinney - "I wanna be your Joey Ramone"

The pioneers - "long shot" (not to be confused with their "long shot kick de bucket," which is a different song with the same chord progression.)

Madness - "My Girl"

Lauryn Hill - "Doo Wop/That Thing"

Helium - "All the X's Have Wings"

Destroyer - "Certain Things You Ought To Know"

Refused "New Noise"

good smattering of mid 90s post riot grrrl, 70's "skinhead reggae" and white british appropriations thereof, and, uh, swedish anarchist post-hardcore?

It's been too unproductive a weekend, though mostly enjoyably so. I spent Friday in the great pangatsbycon banging out the latest draft of my proposal, this time with 100% fewer parenthetical phrases and a half assed, if complete, literature review. Hung out with Johana, then saturday read some Autonomia and watched the latest episodes of Battlestar Galactica (OMG Felix) and Damages (not on hulu, and not really very good) and procrastinated more than i should.

More procrastination today. Watched Donnie Brasco, which takes Goodfellas' (failed) attempt to demystify and deflate the mobster several steps further - Pacino's Lefty is a tracksuit-wearing, washed up schlub of a gangster, though Johnny Depp in the starting role sort of impedes this particular project simply by virtue of the fact that Al Pacino! and Johnny Depp! are starring together in a mob movie!. The scene in which the FBI high ups tip off Michael Madsen's character about Brasco/Pistone also makes no sense. Anyway, then I read more autonomia and watched Stepbrothers. concurring with my brother's initial diagnosis after having viewed an advance screening before it hit theaters, that the film is rather bizarre.

Tonight I'll prep for class tomorrow, which means Plato and Aristotle. Neither of whom I've read since high school greek class. This was the most boring blog post ever, so let me refer you to the latest manifesto to have emerged from the New School Occupation. I object to some of the assertions they make about the supposed inherently reactionary or bourgeois nature of meetings and organizing strategy, and the disciplinary chest-beating is similarly a little tiresome, but there's nevertheless much here that's valuable. I particularly appreciate the critique of critique and the elaboration of the university as battleground for a range of social struggles, the refusal to fall prey to exceptionalist, bourgeois accounts of the university's removal from the social, from the "real world." The university is of the real world, is in the real world, and so are the struggles to transform/destroy/replace/your verb here it. The problematization of the university here is eloquently articulated and ably expresses the urgency and necessity of such organizing and such struggles.

II. The university shall never again be merely the lukewarm appendage to civil society that our (hypo)critical theorists so highly acclaim; rather, as our friends in Greece have shown, the university can also be an appendage to civil war, a space in which impenetrable bodies and inflammable knowledges can conspire towards the dissolution of their very condition, that is, separation. Yet it is exactly that sharing between life and thought that is preemptively banned from the territories marked under the sign “university.” Such territories betray their innocence not only in their concrete unfolding, but in their very name. There is nothing “universal” about the university anymore except the universality of emptiness. Students and professors spend their waking lives covering up this void with paltry declarations and predictable nonactions. The void should no longer be avoided; it should be unleashed.

Seceding from the university is no longer enough. One must bring it down as well.

Now back to your regularly scheduled commodity fetishism, which should indicate exactly how divorced I, and this blog, have been from anything resembling the political of late.

Nate Evans - "Pardon my innocent heart"
Tony Donne's Hollywood Quintet - "Micaela"
Andrea Williams - "Love Makes Me Do Foolish Things"
King Django - "What's The Use"
Rufus Thomas - "The Dog"
Sonic Youth - "In the mind of the bourgeois reader" lol
kaleidoscope - "holidaymaker"
Smashing Pumpkins - "Luna"
Outkast - "Decatur Psalm"
Manu Dibango - "Aphrodite Shake"

two more things about the inaugural speech

1. I liked the remaking america stuff, because of the constituent politics it creates a space for, hopefully not neoliberal reaganite voluntarism but instead an invitation, not that we needed one, to bring "change" from below, not a cooptation but instead a gesture of solidarity, though that's ultimately up to us.

2. I liked the hope not fear line. Obviously.

Other schools are canceling searches and imposing hiring freezes, but not my mala mater. Yale, instead, has decided to hire war criminal and death squad pal John Negroponte to join union-buster Paul Kennedy's grand strategy program along with John Gaddis and fellow neocon iran contra figure Charles Hill.

This despite a 25% drop in the university's endowment which has led administrators to impose a freeze on salary increases and swear to continuously trim budget costs from employee benefits. So is Negroponte, who holds no PhD, whose hands-on experience should land him not in front of undergraduates but rather in front of the international criminal court, worth it? Or, put differently, what does this say about the "scarcity" dynamics of university job markets (academic and otherwise) and what does it tell us (as if we didn't already know) about the priorities of the "global" university?

From IHE

• A sign of the times: A group of labor unions in Boston is questioning whether teaching hospitals there are contributing enough to the city’s coffers, The Boston Globe reports. The group, Community Labor United, released a report, “The Nonprofit City,” suggesting that the city’s major nonprofit hospitals are paying their fair share at a time when the city’s finances are a mess. The report found that the hospitals had made voluntary payments of $4 million when the taxes they would have owed on their property would have resulted in a contribution of $64 million toward the city services from which they benefit. Officials of the hospitals said the report greatly underestimated their contributions to the city, especially in the provision of medical services to the needy. As urban and state economies struggle, calls like the one in Boston are likely to escalate inversely.

From the Globe aritcle

Community Labor United, a coalition of union and activist groups, found that the city's eight biggest teaching hospitals would have owed $64.2 million in city taxes in 2007 if their land and buildings had been taxed like commercial property. Instead, the hospitals made voluntary payments to the city of just $4 million in 2007, a year when they collectively had profits of more than $750 million.

"They're not paying their fair share," said Mary Jo Connelly, director of research for Community Labor United, whose members include a union seeking to organize city hospital workers. "In a time that everyone is sacrificing, it's time for them to step up and start addressing these shortfalls. We know there are going to be significant layoffs of teachers, police, Fire Department personnel, and that sort of thing. If they paid only 25 percent [of the property tax rate], we could save 115 firefighters" from layoff.

and here's the report

Finally, Boston’s AMCs do not even provide an adequate level of charity care to the poor, one of the core purposes underpinning their nonprofit tax-exemption. They fall very far below the proposed federal standard of directing 5% of their revenues to provide uncompensated charity care for low-income patients. These failures cannot be attributed to a lack of resources: in Fiscal Year (FY) 2007, Boston’s AMCs had profits—which they call surpluses—ranging from $9 million to $355 million, and owned assets worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The property tax exemption AMCs enjoy as nonprofit institutions represents additional millions of dollars in public subsidies they receive every year in the form of tax exemptions. Ironically, this adds to the AMCs’ capacity to buy more land and buildings, which takes even more land off the tax rolls and increases traffic and other burdens on adjoining neighborhoods.

inaugurations

First day of lecture is tomorrow after a break of hermitude, gramsci, and autonomia. I'm suddenly extremely stressed out. It snowed a lot yesterday. I walked through Green-Wood cemetery - whence originate that picture of those geese, snow covering their backs. It was quiet and beautiful, and a nice escape from reading/writing/worrying, though no substitute for the way MLK day should be commemorated, which is in struggle, not shirking from critiquing the more problematic aspects of King's ideology while nevertheless adamantly refusing the neoliberal attempts at cooptation of a leader and organizer who demanded a "radical revolution of values" and was murdered fighting for striking service workers in Memphis, on the very spot where today a crowd watched Barack Hussein Obama's inauguration as the president of the U.S.

I watched the inauguration from my home, flipping back and forth between ABC (cheesy insert shots of the golden gate bridge and various sundry national icons during Aretha's performance, ugh) and PBS (David Brooks and the two historians not named Peniel Joseph, ugh) because ABC got the best picture on my bunnyt ears and PBS had a historian who wrote a book about the black power movement commenting on the inauguration speech instead of like, Doris Kearns Goodwin, who I'm sure is a perfectly nice person and who people tell me is a good historian, but is also a convicted plagiarist and writes books i find entirely uninteresting. Rick Warren apparently asking god's forgiveness for his homophobia was a bizarre spectacle, as was wheelchair-bound Emperor Palpatine. Were i less sympathetic to disability studies critiques, i might conjecture that we had seen medeival literature come to life, not so much physical defacements reflecting inner and innate corruption as the vice president having been literally crippled by his own secrets as he tried to spirit them away from the eyes of historians to god knows where. But of course i don't know what was in the box, and my logic here is complicit in the privileging of certain kinds of bodies.

Anyway, i found a couple of things problematic about the speech - the nationalism, although what else can you expect from a president's inauguration, even this president. The foreign policy stuff, however much more muted and qualified than with the last guy - smart, diplomatic imperialism is still imperialism and it's still in crisis - and that the extremely powerful nods to sweatshop workers, to thie history of the working class, had to be framed by invocations of the gospel of work a la Joe Leiberman on Beinecke Plaza in August 2003. (Joe the traitor kept asserting that "they" - the workers - weren't asking for a lot, kept excusing their struggle's righteousness with fictitious, thankfully, claims as to its narrowness.)

And likewise I'm glad President Obama recognizes the selflessness of workers who accept cutbacks, but i don't think that workers should be expected to, as they say in Italy, "pay for your crisis," that there is a difference between selflessness and exploitation, that who is called upon to sacrifice what for whom is never a neutral set of relationships, always fixed within the shifting ideological and historically produced matrices of race, class, gender, sexuality, and citizenship.

Among the most powerful moments of the speech was

This is the meaning of our liberty and our creed, why men and women and children of every race and every faith can join in celebration across this magnificent mall. And why a man whose father less than 60 years ago might not have been served at a local restaurant can now stand before you to take a most sacred oath.

This was extraordinarily powerful, both because the emotion, the desire for the fulfilment of the dream King described 46 years ago remains a strong component of liberal nationalism, the idea that we can progress towards, are progressing, even have progressed towards an abstract equality that has now reached in the form of president obama, its apotheosis, retains every bit of its hegemony even as the multiculturalism of the 1990s has long since, it seems, given way to the libertarian "post-racialism" of 30rock and south park (which is often just "new racism" in disguise). But, historical objections aside (segregation in DC did not end in the 1940s) this is also powerful because it commemorates what it's stupid to claim as anything other than a victory in a deeper and more profound struggle against histories of race and racism not confined to juridical or representational arenas, that antiracists and pro-POC organizers and activists, workers and thinkers, produced, in a sense, this President in all his contradictory brilliance (here i'm thinking about something Nikhil Singh said at the Policing the Crisis panel back at ASA in october), that his victory (here i'm on my own but inspired by the hope from people bloc) is not simply the victory of neoliberal racial ideology, that he is no mere "centrist," that calling him a neocon in blackface (as i have seen some 'radica;s' allege in the wake of Ken Salazar and Robert Gates and Tim Geithner) is stupid and wrong, however much we need engaged, perceptive critique in the days ahead. To summarize, there were parts of the speech I found deeply moving, not simply as oratory, because they meant that we, at least the we i would like to identify myself with, had won a victory in a struggle that's nowhere near done.

Elizabeth Alexander said it best, more powerfully, my mother thought, bringing to the fore what was and is at stake in what has transpired and what is to come than even the momentous speech her poem followed.

Say it plain, that many have died for this day. Sing the names of the dead who brought us here, who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges, picked the cotton and the lettuce, built brick by brick the glittering edifices they would then keep clean and work inside of.

And I would be remiss if I failed to mention Rev. Lowery, who brought my anarchist ass to tears as soon as he started speaking, and who offered not the platitudes of Warren's invocation but instead lessons in organizing.

And while we have sown the seeds of greed -- the wind of greed and corruption, and even as we reap the whirlwind of social and economic disruption, we seek forgiveness and we come in a spirit of unity and solidarity to commit our support to our president by our willingness to make sacrifices, to respect your creation, to turn to each other and not on each other.

And now, Lord, in the complex arena of human relations, help us to make choices on the side of love, not hate; on the side of inclusion, not exclusion; tolerance, not intolerance. And as we leave this mountaintop, help us to hold on to the spirit of fellowship and the oneness of our family. Let us take that power back to our homes, our workplaces, our churches, our temples, our mosques, or wherever we seek your will.

Bless President Barack, First Lady Michelle. Look over our little, angelic Sasha and Malia.

We go now to walk together, children, pledging that we won't get weary in the difficult days ahead. We know you will not leave us alone, with your hands of power and your heart of love.

Help us then, now, Lord, to work for that day when nation shall not lift up sword against nation, when tanks will be beaten into tractors, when every man and every woman shall sit under his or her own vine and fig tree, and none shall be afraid; when justice will roll down like waters and righteousness as a mighty stream.

Amen.

Aviation terrorists

Green-Wood cemetery, 1/19/2009

on the logic of budget cuts and hiring freezes

And so the scapegoat mythology of "Hunt the Parasite" - the lynchpin of the crisis ideology - comes to the fore... A sort of vague egalitarianism emerges, which scrutinizes the income of the clerical worker, the student, and the tertiary worker, and says nothing, for example, about the transformation of capital-which-is-productive-of-interest: in its most shameful form, this egalitarianism assumes tones of workerist chauvinism. It appears that it is no longer capital that exploits the worker but the postman, the milkman, and the student. These are the first shots in that "class analysis" which will become the official ideology and the preferred argument of the super-paid editorial writers of the Regime's press. It is a crude and effective ideology...

-Sergio Bologna, "A Tribe of Moles," 1977

pithy quotation of the day

There is nothing "Italian" about the class warfare in Italy; there is nothing "original" in the Italian theoretical contributions. If any, their specificity resides in the fact that in Italy these theories have been able to bloom and develop thanks to the class struggles and their formidable continuity. We must avoid ghettoizing Italy, thus neutralizing its importance. To understand italy, one must understand the United States; one must rediscover in the history of American class warfare that political richness which today is attributed to the Italian "intellectuals". To erect a monument to Italy is to play the game of the Italian state: to misrepresent as specific ("the product of certain intellectuals") what is in fact rooted in the workers' history, rooted, above all, in its international crisis.

-Christian Marazzi, 1980

Students at the London School of Economics join colleagues at SOAS (and are now joined by folks at Essex University) in building occupations protesting university investments in arms manufacturers involved in Israel's attacks against the Palestinians in Gaza, demanding that their university issue a statement in support of the people of Gaza and undertake humanitarian efforts. More here.

That's four posts in five days. What is this, 2005?

A goose in every engine

As promised, this week's shuffle

Makonde - Manzara
Charlie Parker - Chasing The Bird
Nas - America
James Brown - Down and Out in New York City
Kool Blues - I'm Gonna Keep On Loving You
Charles Mingus - Los Mariachis
Eric (Showboy) Akaeze and His Royal Ericos - Wetin De Watch Goat, Goat Dey Watcham
Black Flag - Police Story.
Spoon - All The Pretty Girls Go To The City
A Tribe Called Quest - Verses From The Abstract

So we get the chocolate city, the deindustrialized city, New York in the early 70s, on the one hand, and we get postcolonial Lagos, we get Q-tip's Queens of 1991 and Nas's "America" 17 years later, and we get Spoon channeling Edwyn Collins and singing about the city as destination, the neoliberal hipster amusement park city. My ipod is trying to tell me things.

This is going to be one of those semi-narcissistic blog entries about me in which i try to work in stuff about the rest of the world too. I'm mostly kidding with the disclaimer. I don't think i'm much of a narcissist. You may disagree, of course.

Incomplete number two is about three pages or so from being done. I will finish it tomorrow, i think, then work on my diss proposal for a day or two, then start the final incomplete, which is, i think, going to be a review essay on race and financialization. It was originally going to be about the Birmingham School's race analysis, and maybe i'll decide to go back to that instead. I feel like the financialization stuff is important for understanding the past year and would be an excuse to read Christian Marazzi's Capital and Language, Ian Baucom's SPecters of the Atlantic, and Randy Martin's recent stuff, all of which could be useful for my project(s) broadly concieved.

I spent the majority of "break" in the library, researching, writing or trying to. Bobst is slightly more tolerable when it's less populated, but its fascist (literally, i learned last night) architecture has always unnerved me, far more so than SML's imperialist cathedral to orientalist and colonialist knowledges, say, or the fact that the NYPL was in Ghostbusters and Slimer could phase through that wall at any second, and then, i mean, who ya gonna call? Someone said recently that I reminded them of Jeanine. Not Louis, Jeanine.

Still, there's a feeling of satisfaction on the one hand in vold in making headway on this crap that's been hanging over my head for so long - like i'm actually getting stuff done, mixed with fear, because the papers are going to suck, because now i actually have to be evaluated on this stuff, because what now, because i don't want to be a professor if that means this. (Not to say that i don't respect the hard decisions folks had to make, but if hotel workers ask you to boycott the hotel you boycott the hotel. End of story. Whatever the problematic politics of the same sex marriage movement when they're making alliances with immigrant service worker unions and the American Historical Association fails to stand with them, that is a sad day. Anyway.) I'm also feeling stressed out, because this is taking so long, because I have so much to do this senmester, and because my Plato is rusty - i just remember there's that dude named Kephalos, which means "head" in Greek. I found this funny in high school, not for prurient reasons - get your head out of the gutter, nonexistent reader! More because of the absurdity, maybe the irony of a philosopher or philosopher's consilgliere named "Mr. Head." Also it sounded like the sock puppet from south park which i had not yet fully repudiated then. It's hard to recognize something as libertarian when they're mocking Atlas Shrugged and you're fifteen. Or sixteen. I guess i was sixteen. I'd contextualize the Plato remark, but this is the interwebs and google can come back to hurt your favorite alderpeople.

Still no cease fire in Gaza, no contract in chicago, (and we don't want no peace, we want equal rights and justice.)

At some point in the soonish future i want to write something about Moore and Gibbons' Watchmen before they turn it into a really shitty movie in which the writer has no stake (having forsaken it in protest of DC Comics' refusal to let the copyright revert to him.) And at some point i should really resume critical analyses of the university. Let's start with this.

Back to work for a bit, then sleep, then more work.

EDIT: forgot this last week, and i'll do another tomorrowish
Marnie Stern: Healer

Wally Cox + The Natives: House Party. rare funk track from california. Lot of hammond.

Charlie Parker - Donna Lee

Joe Lovano and Greg Osby - Truth Be Told sadly hadn't listened to this since high school

Mirah -- Exactly Where We're From. Isn't she from like Wynnewood or Bala Cynwyd?

Darkness - Gamith

Run DMC - Hollis Crew. they are going in the rock and roll hall of fame with metallica. They should team up for the black tracksuit album.

Specials - Blank Expression.

De la Soul - Supa Emcees

The Monks - Complication. This song is ridiculous.

conrecerca

I'm sitting in the panopticon - which I'm lately starting to think about as the Great Gatsby of academic libraries, its massive empty space (and dearth of books) in the middle of space-starved downtown manhattan as equivalent to Gatsby's shelves of unread volumes, as conspicuous consumption transitions to conspicuous waste.

Anyway I'm trying to finish one of two remaining incompletes, on Gramsci's "Americanism and Fordism," and i'm about three pages in.

On the subway in from Brooklyn, i read Nick Dyer-Witheford's peice on class composition and multitude theory in Werner Bonefeld's new Subverting the Present, Imagining the Future, (Autonomedia 2008) which Andy hipped me to (did i just say "hipped me to?" This is what happens when you go to grad school. You forget how to speak/write/think because you're so anxious about the academy's pathological, reactionary politics of value and unspoken - at least in public - ethics of competition.) It's a really smart and useful attempt to evaluate the critiques of Hardt and Negri from other autonomists, to think about the utility of the multitude concept in a modified form, and to suggest and highlight forms of inquiry and analysis which proceed from such a utility, like Precarias a la Deriva and Collectivo Situaciones. It's a really useful, synthesis, as so much of Dyer-Witheford's tend to be. I'm already thinking about how to integrate some of the insights into my diss proposal.

clarification

My problem with an academic boycott is entirely tactical. I think it's useless and i think student movements and yes even faculty associations can intervene in ways that are way more direct and way more powerful. I think that even when their are caveats (e.g., "unless they reject the invasion of Gaza") it looks fishy, it ascribes the actions of the state on to the bodies of the citizen in a way that winds up reproducing Zionist logics, and it doesn't really attack in any way the policies or forces against which folks are trying to organize against.

If you've got an argument for why a boycott against Israeli academics makes strategic/tactical sense, I'd love to hear it.

Zach divests from Israel

I divested from Israel this week. I didn't actually know i was invested in Israel until a couple of days ago. My great-grandmother, who died in 1987 (when I was six years old) apparently took out a bond in my name with the state of Israel which matured about thirteen years ago. My great grandmother never told anyone about this bond, in all likelihood because she had Alzheimer's when she bought the bond, and her symptoms only intensified in the last six years of her life. This meant that I never really knew her. It also meant that nobody knew that this bond existed until my dad found it, going through his grandmother's papers last week. (My dad's side of the family were suburban Philly republicans, the right wing branch of the family, at least compared to the anarchists and bundist/communists on my mother's side.)

I promptly sent the bond in to be cashed (apparently you can do this by mail.) I have doubts about the efficacy of, say, boycotting Israeli academics, but I'm staunchly anti-zionist and the thought that my name and my family have been wrapped up in the occupation of the West Bank and the brutal state terrorism in the Gaza strip sickens me. So, IDF, consider my personal divestment from your repressive and ideological state apparatuses long overdue, and a gesture of solidarity, however small, with Palestinians, Israelis, and other Jews fighting for social justice in the middle east and all over the world.

I tried writing a year end post on the subway on wednesday night shuttling back and forth btw manhattan and brooklyn so i could go into the city then back to my apt then back to the city because i forgot my ID to get into a bar/club i had no desire to go to, because I don't drink and i don't like crowded clubs on new years where drunk people I don't know elbow me. Anyway it wasn't a productive excercise, and I'm too busy at the moment to give such an endeavor the attention it would command of me.

Anyway, I (re-sort of)read "The Power of Women and The Subversion of The Community" yesterday, and today, I'm going to walk into the city and read a lot of Gramsci.

Two quick links on universities and debt. David Swensen is buying it up and a university near you is making deals with credit cards to profit from students', alumni, and workers' financial insecurity.

random ten
I put my ipod on shuffle and this is what it played.

Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers - Moanin'
Super Rail Band - Maliyo (From Rail Band vol 1. This is really great.)
Fela Kuti - ODOO
Toots and The Maytals - Careless Ethiopians
Edd Henry - Your Replacement Is Here
Desmond Dekker - Big Headed
Vic's Pick - Damaged (From the Version City compilation. Late '90s NYC dub.)
MIA - Pull Up The People
Woody Guthrie - I Ain't Got No Home
Beck - Dead Melodies. I thought this album was really great in 1998. Now I am not so sure, which probably has a lot to do with the whole scientology thing and everything isnce Midnight Vultures being exceedingly boring.