and sometimes i just ain't in the mood to take my place in back with the loudmouths

So i got those remastered versions of Tim and Pleased to Meet Me today. I was somewhat skeptical about the need for remasters on the twin tone cds. They always sounded perfect to me as is, and the graininess of the earlier CD mixes of Let It Be in particular felt more appropriate to what the album is and is trying to do than the remaster, which gave certain songs a vh1-y feel. But Pleased to Meet Me always sounded terrible on CD - distant, muted, brackish. I'm listening to the remaster now, and the songs that always sounded great sound better - those horns on "Can't Hardly Wait," for instance, now evoke the Memphis soul they were supposed to rather than Huey Lewis and the News, and i can hear subtleties of the guitar riff on "Alex Chilton" that I can't on the original CD version. The songs i usually skip on the album also sound better - "The Ledge" is explosive now, and the lyrics of "Shooting Dirty Pool"'s first verse are now almost comprehensible. "Nightclub Jitters" sounds hte most radically different - the remaster brings the bass way up, and it almost sounds like Sinatra meets Portishead or something.

Tim sounds mostly the same to me, and for me, that's a good thing. I've never had any problem with Tommy Erdelyi's production on that CD. One thing the remaster does is make Left of the Dial slightly cleaner, but not so much that it doesn't sound like what it is, a paean to the 1980s 'alternative' scene. At any rate, "Bastards of Young" and "Here Comes A Regular" sound as good as always, just a little louder, and I'm fine with that. Between them, the two discs have four different versions of "Can't Hardly Wait," one acoustic (which doesn't really work at all), with three different versions of the lyrics. The "Studio Demo" of "Kiss Me on the Bus" has Dinosaur Jr. levels of distorted guitar. "Nowhere is my home," an unreleased track from the Tim sessions, shows how great a guitarist Bob Stinson could be. Pleased to Meet Me has TEN bonus tracks. Some of the unreleased stuff, like "Birthday gal" and the incredible "photo," whose pre-chorus is awesomely reminiscent of Blue Oyster Cult's "burnin' for you," are wonderful. Chris Mars's take on "Cool Water" anticipates Cool Dump (and predates it by two decades.)

My three day-long stint in post-nasal hell caught up with me in the classroom today. It wasn't that I was underprepared so much as that my brain wasn't making the connections i wanted it to, that I just kind of blanked on where I wanted class to go and about a third of the connections i wanted to push people to make. Which sucks, because it was an important week in terms of the readings -- racialized domestic work. emotional labor. affect. Grr. Bobst Library is much more fun at 7 AM.

Mets are currently down 5 to 1 in the eighth. Here's hoping they pull out of it...

\EDIT: in lieu of Arlie Russel Hochschild's work and following Kathleen Barry's own work on flight attendant labor, i should note that "Waitress in the Sky" is an obnoxious, bad, and offensive song from a guy who once expressed admiration of ronal dreagan and said some dumb shit about Vietnam but writes (mostly) amazing songs.

Case in point: "Swingin' Party"

The Mets, Briefly

The amount of vitriol heaped on Willie Randolph for speculating that some of the vitriol directed at him by the media might be racially motivated is ridiculous. Of course some of it's racially motivated. Ever since Minaya and Randolph took over, the more racist section of sports media have routinely racialized the Mets' roster and managerial decisions. "Omar wants an all-latino team," etc. Billy Wagner and Paul Lo Duca's clubhouse outbursts to the media have not helped matters.

So maybe the fact that the mets suck right now is Randolph's fault. Maybe it's Minaya's, who traded away promising young players like Brian Bannister, Jeff Keppinger, Henry Owens, Matt Lindstrom, Heath Bell, etc for scraps the mets aren't using. But the mob of reporters sounding the Willie Randolph deathwatch can't be helping anyone play better baseball. Maybe it's Randolph's job to offset that, but none of this makes that any easier to do.

EDIT: Peter Gammons gets it right.

ugh

Morning after the mets' expulsion from the postseason after Oliver Perez of all people pitches well and Endy Chavez makes another fucking incredible catch - to rob Scott Rolen of a 2 run homer and turns a double play - as if that wasn't enough. It was a great season, but we also - because of a series of freak injuries - didn't have the pitcvhing depth to beat detroit, and Steve Trachsel's suckitude in game 3 really doomed us, I think. But even without Pedro, El Duque, or Duaner Sanchez, the mets were able to force and almost win a Game 7, and that's leaps and bounds better than anything the team's done since the unceremonial end of the 2000 world series. Plus, the future's looking up. There's always next year, I suppose.



The current iteration of the piracy project is handed in, which is good, because it was driving us nuts. I saw Abbey and Amelia Sunday and I'm hanging out with them and some other UOC folks tonight (hopefully AM, Dubba, and TWF,) which is awesome. Plus, i saw Cathy yesterday fro the first time since she randomly showed up on the GSOC picket line last December and only the second time since college, so that was also awesome.

Still, I am really bummed out about the mets.

Edit: But if you were wondering what differentiates the Mets from the Yankees, I offer this as proof, though i could offer a great deal more:

“We went to the last out of the last inning of the last game, and we gave it our all,” Minaya said. “What else can you ask for?

In a downtrodden clubhouse, plastic sheets still hung draped over televisions and computers in preparation for a Champagne bath, when Fred Wilpon, the Mets’ principal owner, entered. He went directly to Heilman, grabbed his arm and thanked him before crisscrossing the room to meet with the coaching staff.

On his way out, he found Minaya in the middle of the locker room. As they hugged, Minaya told him, “The players didn’t cheat you, they didn’t cheat you.”

If i appear to be carefree

I want to note here that yesterday's post on the politics of the hug is as close to psychoanalysis as I'm going to get ever, so enjoy it.

Also "Tears of a Clown." Great song. So's "The Tracks of My Tears." Basically, if you put Smokey Robinson anywhere near themes of concealed anguish between 1960 and 1970, you got a great song.

Mets won yesterday on a 2-run HR by Carlos Beltran off a fastball that Jeff Weaver hung over the middle of the plate. Tonight's John Maine against Chris Carpenter. Glavine pitched seven shutout innings and the bullpen worked out of a couple of jams. Good game.

Last night, while the game was on, during the commercials i switched to channel 25, WNYC TV, which was airing an episode of its old-school hip hop video show "The Bridge" about the Wu-Tang clan. I caught the videos for "Da Mystery of Chessboxing," "C.R.E.A.M," and "Triumph" and interviews with U-God, Masta Killa, and Inspectah Deck, all of whom look old. Particularly compared to what they looked like in 1993. The GZA is 40 years old!

The Good, The Bad, The Weird, and the Ugly

The Good:

• The Mets swept the Dodgers in the NLDS to move on to the NLCS for the first time since 2000 in a crazy game in which the mets were up 4-0, down 5-4, and then won 9-5.

• I just saw Alek for the first time since 2004.

The weird:

• The squirrel fight on Chapel between Flatbush and Jay this morning. A rolling mass of bush tails sweeping across the sidewalk.

• Walking across the manhattan bridge while the avon walk against breast cancer was walking in the other direction. I was dressed in all black, they were all in pink and white and looking at me strangely. I felt like cancer's metonym or something.

The bad:

• being pursued by the New York County Department of Jurors and threatened with jail for not responding to jury duty letters i never got, because i haven't lived in NY County for years.

• The announcers in Dodgers Stadium who couldn't pronouce Endy Chavez's surname despite the fact that they work in fucking Chavez Ravine.

The ugly:

• A homeless man was beaten bloodly and lying dazed on the street as I walked down Waverly between Bway and Mercer this afternoon. Someone called 911 and the cops and fire dept/EMTs came. A bizarre and fucked up little rupture in the geography of the neoliberal urban amusement park.

Let's Go Mets

I don't blog about baseball very much. And, being the superstitious animal (be it monkey, penguin, or Panda) that I am, I certainly don't want to jinx anything, but the Mets are in the playoffs for the first time in six years. Despite losing two of their best pichers to season-ending injuries (Pedro Martinez, one of the best pitchers ever, is out at least 8 months, Orlando Hernandez injured his calf jogging in the outfield the day before he was supposed to start Game 1) the mets have won their first two games against the dodgers and only need one more win to the series and move on to the NLCS -- probably facing the St. Louis Pujol-- i mean Cardinals. Last night, i got no work done, because i was sitting at home watching Tom Glavine, a 40 year old pitcher, throw six shutout innings, and Julio Franco, who's 48, beat out a double play ball to first base. It was fun to watch - and made more fun by the constanbt text messaging back and forth between me and my brother, reminiscent of our email exchanges during the 2004 NLCS when the Red Sox came back from an 0-3 deficit for the first time in baseball history to beat the Yankees and move on to the world series. It's sad that Martinez and Hernandez are hurt, and i don't know how far the Mets can go with out them, but they're doing a pretty great job thus far and it's fun to watch.

since i forgot to do this last week and the week before, you get not one but two random shuffle playlists this weekend.

New pornographers- "Use It"
Man Man - "Banana Ghost"
Stevie Nicks and Tom Petty - "Stop Draggin' My Heart Around"
Notorious B.I.G. - "Things Done Changed"
Linton Kwesi Johnson - "New Crass Massahkah"
Mighty Diamonds - "I Need a Roof"
The Ramones - "Sheena is a Punk Rocker"
Mission of Burma - "The Ballad of Johnny Burma"
Xiu Xiu - "Crank Heart"
Dinosaur Jr. - "Lose"

Mets beat the Braves last night, so now i'm all happy.

Mets interlude

Pedro Martínez won his 200th game yesterday as the Mets beat the Braves 4-3 on Pedro's 8-strikeout pitching perfomance, the stregnth of the revamped bullpen, and home runs by Xavier Nady and Carlos Delgado. The Mets currently, and shockingly, havre the best record in baseball. Moves Minaya made in the offseason which attracted a lot of scrutiny now seem to have paid off. Xavier Nady, who nobody thought could really replace someone like Mike Cameron, has been fantastic. Duaner Sanchez, for whom the Mets gave up Jae Seo to the Dodgers, has still yet to allow a run, and while I wlaways thought the Delgado acquisition was a great move, he's been pretty much everything anyone could hope for. Even Beltran's been pretty good - at least before he injured his hamstring and sat out the last few games. And Tom Glavine's been the 2-time Cy Young award winning Tom Glavine, not the 4.50 ERA Tom Glavine. The Mets will play the Braves 18 more times this season, but I'm cautiously optimistic...

John Sexton is the 7th most loathsome New Yorker

New York Press

7 John Sexton
University president
What’s worse than a bunch of
over-educated, privileged crybaby Felicity wannabes? Their disciplinarian daddy,
of course. John Sexton helms NYU, that beacon of Downtown real estate and
strike-busting. Sexton gave the rising princes of capitalism at the Stern School
of Business a lesson in how to break the back of underpaid workers when he
refused to negotiate with the Graduate Student Organizing Committee. The private
university grad student union’s contract had expired, and Sexton’s stonewalling
led to a November strike.
Picket lines and petitions led to cancelled
classes. Some co-eds went keg wild—in support of the strikers. The strikers
believed that they had won the day. But Sexton, the Andrew Carnegie of Academia,
wouldn’t budge instead issuing an “or else.” The union and its members claimed
Sexton’s tactic was proof of their power. The strike is ongoing, yet unlike the
Transit Workers Union walkout, NYU’s newsworthiness fizzled quickly. With a
reduced workforce, the university, whose tentacles have spread from the East to
West Village, apparently hasn’t taken over enough of Downtown Manhattan, and
is—if you can believe it—looking to expand. While the school administration
claims the undergraduate enrollment is shrinking, and therefore revenue, NYU
dorms and classrooms are sprouting like poisoned mushrooms over the two
villages. One such project has the villagers brandishing torches and pitchforks:
A 26-story dorm at the corner of Fourth Avenue and East 12th Street. That’s the
site of the soon-to-be-former 159-year-old St. Ann’s Church (the Landmarks
Commission caved into NYU and denied landmark designation). The building would
be the tallest in the East Village. If you were wondering whatever happened to
the Saint and the Palladium, the city’s two best-ever nightclubs, it’s easy:
NYU. Lower Third Avenue now looks like Upper Third Avenue, thanks to all the
dorm highrises. A recent $200 million gift, earmarked for an institute dedicated
to the research of ancient civilizations, will further pad the pockets of a
school administration that has already eaten everything around Washington
Square.

The rest of the list is problematic. Mike Piazza isn't loathsome at all, except to the extent that he's a republican. And Roger Toussaint? Please. Roger Toussaint ranked higher than Bllomberg AND Pataki is a joke.

beisbol

The Red Sox are done, but I think Boston Fans will probably let them off the hook for losing to the best team in baseball and because everyone there's still pretty stoked about last year and you can't knock a team that had two players hit over 45 Home Runs this season. (I don't care if Alex Rodriguez invents the cure for alzheimers, David Ortiz deserves the AL MVP far more. "A-Rod" makes 25 million dollars a year, played ok defense, sometimes terrible, and hit .321 with 47 home runs. Ortiz makes 6 million dollars a year, hit .297 with 48 HR and over 140 RBI. And he's the best clutch hitter in baseball, with the possible exception of Manny Ramirez, who's hit more grand slams than anyone in history except for Lou Gherig. Also, A-Rod did that slap thing against Bronson Arroyo in the ALCS last year, and that should count against him. Cort Schilling, asshole fundamentalist anti-NYC millionaire that he is, was right to call that shit "bush-league.") One more loss and the Yankees are out, which Mets fans around New York are silently and sometimes vocally praying for. Other than that, I hate the Braves for the racist nomenclature and for ever having employed John Rocker, so i hope they lose, but i don't want Houston to win either, because Clemens is a schmuck and Petite used to be a Yankee and Oswalt's a schmuck too (just ask Cliff Floyd.) I could root for the White Sox now that the Mets and Red Sox are out. My grandfather grew up a White Sox fan in the post scandal era when no one was a White Sox fan. But Carl Everett is an asshole. And if they go up against St. Louis in the World Series, assuming STL can beat whoever wins the Braves-Astros series, i think they'll lose, barring another collapse/ridiculous pitching dominance like the Cardinals had and faced last year.

Weber's a racist, a firm believer in the unique force and grandeur of Occidental capitalist modernity, something of an anti-semite, and does not, i believe, mention women much if at all throughout his magisterial work of historical sociology, The Protestant Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism, in which he attempts to trace the relationships between puritanical asceticism and capitalist discipline. It's still interesting to read, but it's also pretty infuriating, and i hope the discussion on monday is a good one. Now on to Kathy M'Closkey's book on Navajo Weaving, which is interesting so far (i'm only 13 pages in) and has already cited Maria Mies' Patriarchy and Accumulation on A World Scale. Which is cool.

There are lots more pictures of the baby panda up at the National Zoo website, which will proovide me with blog fodder for weeks. For now, I just want to let you all know that if i were a baby panda, I too would hang out in large tupperware containers.


The Mets won today, and the Yankees lost not only their game against the Blue Jays, but also sole posession of first place. Oh, the Schadenfreude. Pandas probably don't do Schadenfreude. They are probably to busy hanging out in tupperware containers.

baseball (ludic interlude)

the mets have taken the first three ga,es of a four game series from the diamondbacks. The last two games were huge blowouts. This one especially so - the final score was 18-4. Jose Reyes homered and David Wright and the rookie call-up Mike Jacobs each homered twice. The diamondbacks had to use six pitchers, five of whom have ERAs over 5.00. Tomorrow is the last game of the series, and Pedro Martinez is pitching for the Mets. Martinez has been great all season but hasn't won a game in hist last 4 or 5 starts, mostly because of bullpen collapses.

Not that it wouldn't be great if the Mets acquired Manny Ramirez (provided they don't have to strip their farm system to do so,) but why in god's name would the Red Sox be stupid enough to trade the best home-run hitter in the AL and the player who is currently leading all of baseball in runs batted in?

Yesterday was a good day. Yale announced that it would nearly double it's voluntary payments to new Haven. 82% of GESO members in the humanities and social sciences voted to strike. (Someone should probably tell the YDN that GESO didn't acually strike in September '03. Barring that, they could actually do research or something. That would be nice, i'm sure.) Those UOC kids put out a third volume of Community In Crisis. The Mets beat the astros, 1-0 in the 11th. I got accepted into NYU's American Studies PhD program off the wait list. I'm planning to accept, barring the aid packaging including so massive a debt burden as to make the whole indentured servitude thing lose even the sheen of metaphor, and i'm really excited and also really nervous.

The upshot is, this blog can probably now stop being a narcissistic outlet for my self-pitying pathos and start being useful again, which i'm sure brings a sigh of relief to all of y'all. (Now, was that my impression of Helena or my impression of Alek expropriating Helena's 'y'all?' You be the judge.)

You better WORK

I was here in the office until 10:40 last night doing database work. Fourteen hour days aren't particularly fun.

Today i need to go buy some coal - enough to stuff 100 plastic stockings. I still don't know if we shut down this morning's event or not. I also need to clean my apartment up and get myself in good shape to leave for san francisco tomorrow morning. And i need to run to the store and buy the expanded edition of ROTK, because i'm obsessive like that. And it'll give me something to do on the plane. Assuming i bring my computer, which i'm not sure i will.

Oh yeah, and i need to complete a draft of my personal statement and find a third reccommender. Oy vey. (Anyone want to write me a letter of recommendation for graduate school?)

Hopefully, i'll soon post a response to Katie's thoughtful comments on the Kerik post, though there will probably be a hiatus here until saturday or sunday while i deal with san francisco and moving and hopefully get some grad school stuff done too.

The Mets are signing Pedro Martinez!

Update: 40 lbs of coal purhased and hauleed back to the office by hand from Shaw's. I feel all manly. Well, ok, i'm kidding about everything except the coal part.