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"