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.

I've been very unproductive today. I think it's propter nivem, as my 8th grade Latin teacher olim dixit. It has to end. In part I'm excited about buying a new computer, now that Vista is out, to replace the one that died over the summer (the one I'm typing on now is on loan from mis padres. It's tiny and "ultra portable" in the language of computer-purchasing, which is cool, but there's lots of stuff it can't really do.) And I'm a little burnt out from the last week of crazy meetings and visiting friends et cetera. By the way, the "c" is hard. Like a building occupation. Just kidding.

The work i have managed to get done so far has been some reading for class, and some research for an incomplete paper, though not as much as I would have liked. I also slowly finished season 2 of The Wire, which is the most nuanced and compelling depiction of union corruption I've ever seen, ludicrous NOI assassin caricatures notwithstanding. And today I took a walk, thought about New York and the racialized geographies of southern Brooklyn and discovered the Tasti-D-Lite on 86th street in Bay Ridge. And I paid my cable bill and my electricity and my credit cad bill, which was pretty swollen from coursebooks and the impulse buys on amazon I made too many of while writing my Postcolonial Marxism paper over break. I kind of like not having class on Mondays this semester, but I can see it too easily becoming too seductive as far as procrastination's concerned. Speaking of which, this is a useless entry, and I have better things i should be doing right now. So if you want to read today's attempt at a substantial entry go here if you haven't already. Otherwise, don't tell me anything about season's three or four of The Wire, because I'm going to hold off on watching them until the end of the semester.

But while I'm rambling, here are bizarre search hits which have led folks to this humble blog:
industrial age progressive companies pro-labor
The UFW movimiento clap
SODEXHO INTERNET NYUS
president giamatti on "phil donahue" yale
police sirens whoop new york
dov charney has issues

Last Night, a DJ Saved My Life From a Broken Heart.

The title was just to get your attention. I spent last night sitting in my apartment reading. I totally didn't realize there was a rap (or at least spoken) interlude on that song. I bought this shitty used funk/soul comp a Other music which has way more disco than anything else, including the song from the Freaks and Geeks episode (Discos and Dragons) where Jason Segal's character (that would be Nick Andopolous) participates in the disco competition, and, like, Cameo. It also has Isaac Hayes's "Theme From Shaft," Cheryl Lynn's "Got To Be Real," and Rockwell ft Jacko, "Somebody's Watching Me" (Rockwell's verses on which now remind me of Boots Riley's affected voice on "We Are The Ones.") Rakim and Billy Griffin have the same name. Discuss. Speaking of Rakim, The JB's "Pass The Peas" and Bobby Bird's "I Know You Got Soul" are both great songs (You can find them on the James Brown's Funky People comps, parts 1 and 2 respectively,) but I prefer the songs that sample them on Paid In Full ("Pass The Peas" provides the great horn sample in "I Ain't No Joke," and Eric B. and Rakim's version of "I Know You Got Soul" got them sued, which is said because it may be the most brilliant hip hop recording ever.)

There was snow, or at least ice, on the rooves of the cars outside my window when I woke up this morning, which made me somewhat happy, but then i thought about the fact that this is the warmest winter in NY history, and that scared the bejeezus out of me. Speaking fo the bejeezus, Two mormon missionaries got on the bus at 42nd and 5th (in Brooklyn. I can't remember the last time I was in midtown. Maybe when Julie and I went to the American Girl store to shop for her neice Sofia in November? I don't know.) On the bus were three little kids and their grandmother. One of the kids, a boy who couldn't have been older than four, kept asking people who were getting off at the back doors if they were leaving and then loudly imitated the beeping noise NYC busses make when their doors are opened or they are pulling away from the curb - i'm actually nto sure when and why htey beep and i've lived in this city most of my life.

Spooky has graduated from my custody. I am going to miss her. I said goodbye today and she crawled onto my lap again and kept nudging me with her face.

Year end post. Yeah, sorry about that. It was too detailed in depictions of personal aporia, union frusrations, academic angst. Maybe I'll revise and post. Maybe i won't. It was an insane and difficult year and I hope 2007 turns out much, much better.

Went to Hoboken last night which was cool - new year's came on the path train and a drunk dude in a funny hat shook everyone's hand. all though the train coming home at 5 am had vomit all over it and i stepped in it, which sucked enormously. Also i hurt my ankle.

Never been to Hoboken before. Lots of people lined outside of bars talking about the Jets. Huge lofts and shy cats and somewhere, I'm sure, Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley.

I walked through prospect park yesterday and then down 10th to McDonald down McDonald to Forth Hamilton down Fort Hamilton to the cemetery entrance, and then across greenwood cemetery back to 5th and down 5th home to Sunset Park. The cemetery is beautiful and ancient, mausoleums with ornate masonry and crypts built in rows into hillsides and it was totally quiet and felt like another century except for the odd car that drove by every ten minutes.

I briefly forgot that there was a 24th of december, and thought that that holiday I don't celebrate was today instead of tomorrow. Usually I'm pretty good about figuring out stuff like dates and cardinal directions, but the fact that I've barely left my apartment now in over two weeks has apparently thoroughly befuddled my once keen sense of the useless. Or marginally useful.

For the first week of seclusion, I was extremely productive. I wrote 26 pages in three days. I read like four books. I took lots of notes. The last week's been more difficult, and i'm not sure if it's cabin fever or what. I need to finish regardless, and I don't really understand when finishing papers became this hard (maybe it's the added stress of trying to be "an academic" and having so much of your self worth wrapped up in what and how you write.) When I have left my apartment in the last couple weeks, which has been rarely, I've mostly just walked around my neighborhood, investigated a couple taquerias, found a halfway decent pizza place on 5th and 50th, and made innumerable trips to Key Foods for pasta supplies, candy canes, fat free saltines, and caffeinated soda. As much as I love walking to manhattan every day (which I have not done in weeks,) I also love not having to go to Manhattan. And as much as I hate the fact that I've been unproductive, I love not having to be on the NYU campus or in the panopticon more than words can express. Finally getting internet access in my apartment after a year and a half of living here was a smart move.

My paper-writing was slightly aided by the fact that the entirety of the 1968 San Francisco Newsreel film Black Panthers is on Youtube in its entirety (in six parts). It would be cool if someone would post Finally Got The News or Columbia Revolt or El pueblo se levanta or At The River I Stand, but I'm not going to hold my breath. Black Panthers documents a mass rally/birthday party for Huey P. Newton, who was then in jail on trumped up charges of shooting a police officer. The rally clips are spliced with Okland cops talking about the shotguns they carry, rallies outside the courthouse in which people sing "No more brothers in jail (off the pigs)/the pigs are gonna catch hell (off the pigs)" and extended interviews with Newton in prison and several other figures (all men.) Stokely Carmichael had a pronounced New York/West Indian accent, which makes sense, because he was born in Trinidad and went to Bronx Science before Howard and SNCC and the Panthers and Ghana and CLR James was proclaiming him as the revolutionary hope of diasporic/transnational West Indian radicalism. But I don't think I'd ever seen him on film or heard his voice before, and that was interesting. There's a short clip of Kathleen Cleaver speaking at a rally, but the filmmakers chose to run a Huey Newton voiceover over the footage, so you can't actually hear whatever she was saying. This makes for some problematic gender politics.

This seems way too short to actually be Newton's dissertation, right? Anyone know the story with this?

Taped to a bus stop kiosk on fifth avenue a few blocks south of my apartment, I found an ad for a house for sale in New Haven. The house was clearly run down, and judging from the make and style of the arcvhitecture and the demographics of the neighborhood I live in, I'm guessing the house was either in Fair Haven or maybe the Hill, with the former more likely. I find it really interesting that someone would post a home for sale notice on a bus stop, let alone in a city eighty miles away. The flyer raises interesting questions about the connections and links between two working class latino neighborhoods in very different cities, something I might want to look into more if I were an ethnographer, which I am not. Of course, the fact that we are talking about buying and selling property (and because the flyer was in English) means we're talking about folks in the upper economic echelons of both neighborhoods - probably not the old women who stand on street corners here in the freezing cold every weekend and sell homemade churros outside of the clothing and shoe stores and taquerias that line fifth avenue between the park and 63rd (where Bay Ridge begins) but that doesn't meant there aren't circuits of exchange, communication, and community between these cities - whether of kinship, of common origin in the regions of central and southern Mexico from which a lot of migrants are coming to the Northeastern U.S., or other connections of which i remain ignorant. I'll stop here, since i do not want the gaze which i turn on my neighborhood to be that of the detatched and imperial social scientist...

Bloggers Newly Anonymous

Well, not really. I mean, chances are, if you're reading this, you know who I am. I probably know who you are too, since my readership isn't exactly profoundly expansive - it peaked sometime last year during the strike and i suspect it's since dwindled, though the switch to the beta meant the end of my extreme tracking thingy, so that's really conjecture on my part. Anyway, I don't expect this to radically alter content, but I am somewhat worried about the whole "acacdemic bloggers get screwed" trend/trope, and while i don't really know whether or not I deserve the designation "academic" at this point in my life, I figure it might be best for me to excercise some caution in how I present myself here, hence the deletion of all references to my last name and most references to my first name. If you see references to you here that you want altered or redacted, let's talk.

I was not nearly as productive today as I needed to be, though the day isn't over and maybe i'll get some work done in the next few hours. I did stave off cabin fever by walking down 5th avenue (and then 4th after 95th street, where they intersect,) to Shore Road in Bay Ridge and becoming acquainted with a neighborhood I've lived next to for a year and a half but haven't spent much time in. I also got lunch at one of the taquerias near my apartment, which I hadn't done yet either, mostlybecause when I'm here I usually just make my own lunch. I am really not sure where the rest of the last 10 hours went, and that frightens and frustrates me.

I'm hoping the semianonymity will encourage me to take this blog a little more seriously - returning to longer, more analytic stuff, and to be less refrained sometimes in what and how i write about certain topics, though i am not convinced that this move will actually foment either desired shift, nor that both of these are really where i want to be going anyway. Indeed, recently, I've been thinking of scrapping the whole project altogether, but each time I stop because of the ridiculous amount of time and work i've put into this thing, and the few entries i have written that I feel entirely unambivalent about wanting folks committed to social justice/building worker power/transfirming the production of knowledge in and outside of the neoliberal university to read. We'll see what happens. My anonym may shift frequently or dissappear altogether.

Two good things happened today.

The first was the snow flurries that fell on me as I began my walk to campus. Not really a lot of snow, but enough to make me happy. I love snow.

The second was a meeting I went to briefly this evening at which the undergrads once again made me feel like this place just might be salvageable again. Which is good because other factors were making things feel rather hopeless.

Back to work.

Un Superhero Cansado y Viejo

The title of this post is an expropriation of one of my favorite Josh quotes. It has nothing to do with anything other than that I saw Josh for the first time in almost a year this morning in Park Slope, which was fun.

Thanksgiving was oddly quiet this year - a function of the immdeiate family being all on another continent right now and most of the extended family who made it being of the elderly variety. Also, there were more non-family guests than family members, most of whom were over 60 or 70, and they were thus totally incapable of generating the same kind of ruckus that C and L and Lev and K and J and N and I have done in the past - though Z, Kai, and E do a pretty good job of picking up the slack for three people whose combined age is 12, one of whom isn't even potty trained yet. I miss the folks who couldn't make it - whether because of traffic or because of oblligations to other family elsewhere. I was also exhausted the whole time because of a lingering cold that seems to only now be receeding. It was very weird to not have R there, not so much because I wish she had been there as because that discomfort had become so ritualized and normalized that I found myself shocked by her not being there, by the absence of that familar family drama and trauma which has dominated my interactions with my dad's side of the family for most of my life. This is all sounding way more callous than it is, and I'll shut up about this on the internet. I will say that I deeply love B and Z and am incredibly blessed that they're still around and I can go hang out with them pretty much whenever I want to - like i did today, instructing them on how to use their new cell phone and bringing over a watch they'd left at I and El's and a photo of the immediate family plus B, Z, and J from I'm not sure when that I printed out the other night.

I really like my cousins. I miss my asshole brother who is in Leeds for no reason. Where the fuck is Leeds, anyway?

Did get to see C and L (and A and J) yesterday, when we went to see Casino Royale as part of the annual friday after thanksgiving cousin movie excursion. Good, for a bond movie, problematic by my more usual standards - fucked up racist images of dreadlocked african construction workers getting all shot up for no reason whatsoever except expediency and body count(still might have preferred Happy Feet or Borat or The Pick of Destiny.) And I recently came into posession of the dvd of the complete series of The Adventures of Brisco County Jr., the Bruce Campbell sci-fi western hour long series that was on on friday nights right before x-files for its first season and which I liked a lot when I was twelve. (Sixth grade.) Episode five (if you count the pilot) is called "Brisco in Jalisco" and it's absolutely ridiculous - set in 1893 Mexico with all these guys running around in fake Pancho Villa moustaches that don't even match their hair color, and that guy from NY Undercover plays "Emilio Pena," this pseudo-Zapata figure who talks with a Bronx/Nuyorican accent and sounds more like a Young Lord than an old peasant. Plus they spend the first half of the epsiode retreading every single stereotype of Mexico and Mexicanness before they introduce Michael DeLorenzo (the only Mexican guy on the show without a ridiculous fake moustache) as the messiah figure. So strange. Also, Abel Koontz, Balthazar, Socrates Pool - same person!

Alright. enough totally uninsightful commentary on popular culture from me. Hope everyone had good thanksgivings.

the view from above

Um. Wow.

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.

Streets of Fire

The No Spray coalition reports on carcinogenic pesticide spraying -- on my block.

Pesticide Spraying in New York City
City Again Sprays Crowded City Streets


he New York City Dept. of Health and Mental Hygiene sprayed the dangerous pesticide “Anvil” in sections of Brooklyn last month and continues to fog Staten Island, purportedly to kill mosquitoes which may or may not be carrying West Nile virus. City officials also ordered spraying in Queens and the Bronx.

The first spraying of the year in Brooklyn took place on the evening of August 21. The spray truck – now driven by unionized NYC workers wearing DOHMH insignias – recklessly spewed pesticides in a thick cloud down crowded 5th Avenue in Sunset Park and in the surrounding area in utter disregard of the hundreds of people walking the streets. The truck blasted pregnant women and many, many little children with the spray, and fogged people in dozens of restaurants – their doors wide open – without warning as they ate.

The City put up no signs in the neighborhoods announcing the spraying. They made no public warnings about the dangers of pesticides, the links between pesticides and asthma – which is epidemic throughout New York City -- childhood cancers, lymphomas, neurological disorders, chemical sensitivities . . . nothing. ¹

I wish i had a hometown - moved around too much as a kid to feel any real proprietary sense of place for anywhere, whatever I may have said about New York at various points of my life. The Upper West certainly doesn't feel like home now. And really the only time it did was in early May, 2001. And maybe May-August 2000, that summer after high school when things were simultaneously lazy and lonely and pregnant with possibility - particularly before my job started and after it ended. Now it feels like a haunted strip mall. Like Scottsdale Arizona transposed 3,000 miles and with all the peole replaced by parents and siblings of people i went to high school with or their younger, high school-age cousins and every store is replaced by a commerce bank or Starbucks. The people my age I see around here are all either making exponentially more than anyone I know or have someone else who's payign their rent, or both. I'm up here because Thursday is my dad's 58th birthday and Lev's here for two days and I had to put in some family time. And now I need to make the long trek back to Sunset Park and classes start up again tomorrow and I feel pretty fucking ambivalent about that. And I am feeling what may very well be a profoundly reactionary yearning for a sense of rootedness and safety sorely lacking in a cityscape transfixed in the shifting geographies of capitalism and gentrification.

There is a stand-up comedian offering witticisms on a reified, binarized gender difference in masturbatory practice, my brother's collapsed in the other room, and I should really be getting home, but am enjoying the late-night internet access outside the panopticon. I really need to get wireless in the apartment, and I want to figure out ways this year to contribute something to my neighborhood other than a footprint for the increasinbg numbers of young white people i see at the 45th Street R station.

Who Protects Us From You pt 2

On the corner of Tillary Street and the Flatbush Avenue Extension, there's a building surrounded by police barricades. I walk past it every day on my way over the bridge on my long trek from Sunset Park to Manhattan, one of the few things that's kept me sane over the last year. Today I looked at the barriers and noticed that they all had "New York Stock Exchange" written on them.

"Wow," I though to myself. "This would make a good photograph and dramatize the linkages between finance capital and the hopeland security state." So I whipped out my cell phone and took a picture, but it came out bad, so I hit "discard."

Suddenly I heard shouting. A police officer - usually stationed near the barricades, had jumped out of his NYPDgolfmobile and was screaming at me.

"Did you just take a picture? Did you take a picture of the barricade?"

I was stunned. I knew that the NYPD had been attempting to ban photography in the subways (unsucessfully,) but we weren't in the subway and there was no way anything i was doing should have been grounds for suspicion - leaving aside whether or not what the cop did was legal.

The officer demanded to see my picture and to know why I took it. I should have said "what gives you the right to ask," or demanded to see his badge number or something, but instead i basically went limp and complied and then he walked away and i turned towards the bridge and walked away, anger and frustration and a feeling of violation seeping into my thoughts and manifesting themselves in a panicked fury and overwhelming sense of powerlessness.

Walking over the bridge and staring out at the city, I wanted to throw my umrella over the fence, or smash it and then throw it over, or scream at the top of my lungs. I wanted to go back to the cop and yell at him - calll him a fascist, whatever.

But instead i kept walking, and seethed, and stared at my cellular phone, which now apparently doubles as a weapon of mass destruction.

Would he have let me go if I weren't a middle class white man?

In addition to the Jews for Jesus, who are wandering the streets of Manhattan (and Brooklyn) clad in IDF-style attire and snazzy fascist evangelical messenger bags, another group of people are also clearly seeking to convert us heathen judeos to the side of the Jeebus. This would be the flotilla of teenaged baptist missionaries from Union City, Tennessee currently patrolling Park Slope's 5th Avenue between (like) 13th street and 9th street. They've been around since monday, handing out literature all Jehovah's witness-style and setting up tables with stacks of very abridged bibles. Those psalms are just too risque, i guess. I should note that I've been to Union City, Tennessee, in the dead of the night, when Julie and I stopped at the Wal-Mart there to get gas and food on our long drive across the country in a breakdown-prone 37-year old vehicle.

I think part of the reason that these people piss me off can be best expressed in the form of a song. Or two. The first is, of course, Joe Hill (aka Joel Hagglund)'s "The Preacher and the Slave." (Which, were I actually speaking to you rather than writing a blog entry, and were Thomas present while i was speaking to you, I am sure he would be happy to oblidge you with a couple of verses, because that's the kind of guy he is.)

Long-haired preachers come out every night,
Try to tell you what's wrong and what's right;
But when asked how 'bout something to eat
They will answer with voices so sweet:

CHORUS:
You will eat, bye and bye,
In that glorious land above the sky;
Work and pray, live on hay,
You'll get pie in the sky when you die.

The starvation army they play,
They sing and they clap and they pray
'Till they get all your coin on the drum
Then they'll tell you when you're on the bum:

Holy Rollers and jumpers come out,
They holler, they jump and they shout.
Give your money to Jesus they say,
He will cure all diseases today.
If you fight hard for children and wife --
Try to get something good in this life --
You're a sinner and bad man, they tell,
When you die you will sure go to hell.

Workingmen of all countries, unite,
Side by side we for freedom will fight;
When the world and its wealth we have gained
To the grafters we'll sing this refrain:

FINAL CHORUS:
You will eat, bye and bye,
When you've learned how to cook and to fry.
Chop some wood, 'twill do you good,
And you'll eat in the sweet bye and bye.

The second song i think is pertinent here is The Coup's "Heven Tonite," off 2001's Party Music. A brief excerpt follows.

got faith in the people and they power to fight
We gon make the struggle blossom
Like a flower to light
I know that we could take power tonight
Make 'em cower from might
And get emergency clearance from the tower for flight
I ain't sittin in your pews less you helpin' me resist and refuse
Show me a list of your views
If you really love me
Help me tear this muthafucka up
Consider this my tithe for the offer cup

In other words, the conservatism, self-pathologization, and the fractured and individuated subject colonized by the universal discourse of salvific sacrifice and submission doesn't quite cut it for me. I don't really have a problem with religion per se. I've been to enough prayer meetings and seders and seen folks like Scott M. and Lillian D. in action enough to know that clergy and congregations can intervene in and lead struggles for social justice. There are folks who get left out of these movements and discourses sometimes (and I'd count myself among them,) but there are possibilities for solidarities I will not and cannot discount. The fact remains though, that if the heterosexist, reactionary, fundamentalist Jeebus to which both the Jews for Jerry Falwell and the folks from Tennessee are trying to convert New Yorkers clearly has no desire or plan to tear this motherfucker up and thus clearly cannot really love me. "Where were you when we were on strike for six months?" I wanted to shout at the Jews for Jesus today. And I'm sure any answer i would have recieved would have attempted to cloak a profoundly reactionary discourse of self-pathologization in a new-age fundamentalist preoccupation with individuated salvation - which just isn't going to cut it for me. (It being a theology and practice founded upon and in dialogue with movements for justice and liberation. Bear with me here, I'm no theologian. "I don't even believe in Jeebus")

So, Jews for Jesus, no thank you.

The revolution in this tune and verse
Is a bid for my love to touch the universe
Strugglin' over wages and funds
Let the movement get contagious and run
Through the end when it's gauges and guns
And if we win in the ages to come
We'll have a chapter where the history pages are from
They won't never know our name or face
But feel our soul in free food they taste
Feel our passion when they heat they house
When they got power on the streets
And the police don't beat 'em about
Let's make health care centers on every block
Let's give everybody homes and a garden plot
Let's give all the schools books
Ten kids a class
And give 'em truth for their pencils and pads

Outside my window, folks draped in Mexican flags are walking to the subway. The are heading to Cadman Plaza, where NYC is going to have our own demonstration for immigrant rights, marching across the brooklyn bridge.

I'm going to walk in that direction and try to catch up. If not, I'm there in spirit...

happy birthday jessica.

It was a long day. I helped someone move. I got some work done. I went to the United Nations and saw John Sexton give an arrogant and hypocritical speech on"good governance" and I saw Amy and Asad ask him some very powerful and incisive questions that rather than answer, he chose to launch into an absurd anti-union tirade. (The UN panel facilitator for his part dismissed us as a 'local issue,' which was disgusting. We are an issue for a whole lot of locals. And, beneath the pun, the truth, that the casualization of academic work and the violations of international human rights law represented by the strike have implications which need to be understood in a way that doesn't fall prey to the kind of imperial parochialism one would think the United fucking Nations beyond.) On the subway tonight a drunk guy started calling me a motherfucker, said he didn't like me, and told me and Rana that he had a gun. then I had to explain to this huge drunk Russian guy how to get to Sheepshead Bay.

i'll be home when i'm sleeping

This is my 2005 year end post. If you're interested, my 2003 year end post is here, and my 2004 year end post is here. A bizarre attempt to narrate both through the viewpoint of a broken cell phone is here.

Before I begin, I would just like to say that I hold the microphone like a grudge. (Best hip-hop video ever, maybe, except what the hell is Flava Flav doing?) I would also like to warn everyone that what follows is to some extent an exercise in Narcissism, and if you just come here to read about GSOC, you're more than welcome to skip it.

2005 was like 2004 in the sense that it was an extended experiment in liminality. I walked all over New York City. I spent a lot of time alone. I spent a lot of time feeling pretty miserable about my interactions with people i care about. I spent a lot of time in my parents' apartment watching TV. Some upsetting shit happened, and i spent large periods of time being depressed.

An entire city got wiped off the map of the United States. Bush got reinaugurated and I made an ass of myself in DC and my friends got tear-gassed and there was a really long traffic jam outside philadelphia and we shared our twizzlers with Stacy in the next car over, who was trying to get to dance lessons in Broomhall. There were earthquakes and bombings and NLRB decisions and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, and lots of people write a lot of incisive and not so incisive things about the racialization of catastrophe which it would be inappropriate for me to attempt to summarize here.

I got into grad school. I started grad school. Grad school went on strike. I am still trying to finish my papers. More on the strike below.

I moved to Brooklyn. I spent long hours walking all over Western Brooklyn and up through Prospect Park and across bridges and over canals. I spent large amounts of time in neihborhoods i'd barely ever heard of in the previous sixteen years I'd lived in New York. I saw the Pixies. And the New Pornographers, actually. And MIA. And The Go! Team. And Sleater-Kinney, again. These were all enjoyable.

I found people in NYC with whom i could actually hang out. This was so important for me, particularly last winter and spring when everything was very nebulous and scary.

I found a job for the summer. Well, ok, i was given a job by a very generous Marxist feminist cultural theorist. I spent 20 hours a week poring through St. Clair Drake's papers at the Schomburg and reading through some incredible notes about the livs of "mixed-race" children in post World-War II Britain. It was often overwhelming, but It felt really good to be working and like i was finally starting to move forward with life after months spent on my parents' couch acquainting myself with "Buffy The Vampire Slayer."

A day after i started grad school I was in the union office at an organizing committe meeting, pulling a Josh, i guess, trying to figure out the UAW and NYU and teaching myself how to organize again after not really doing very much of it in any serious and committed way since the September 2003 strike ended. Academic stuff was/is frustrating. I am still, as I write this, trying to finish papers. I think part of the reason this is taking me so long, besides general burnout, is a fear of handing anything substantove in, of being evaluated on my work when i don't feel like I'm capable of producing the kind of work i want to do. And my cohort of first-years is split on the strike. They read this, and I don't intend it in any way as a slight on them, but I also don't really think this blog is the best place for this conversation, so I won't write more, but it's been rough for me, and, I imagine, for them as well.

The Julian calendar is a fairly arbitrary unit of measuring time. While it marks a full rotation of the earth around the sun (more or less,) the dates on which it begins and ends don't really correspond to any otherwise important point in the cycle. Nevertheless, this being a year-end blog post, I'll bow to convention and accede to hegemonic discourses of periodization. So I will conclude by saying that given how fucked up this year has been on a global scale, I feel a lot better about my life right now, without wanting to jinx anything, than I did on December 31, 2004. I'm feeling hopeful about the future, and I'm looking forward to seeing what 2006 holds, (including and in addition to a lot of hotel contract expiration dates.) That seems like enough for now.

[We now return you to your regular levels of blog narcissism]

I gave directions to somebody today. In Brooklyn. It made me feel very pleased with myself.

I don't think that guy we were shouting "arrest John Sexton" at was John Sexton. Point still stands though. Registration stuff pretty much all taken care of, though i still need to figure out if i can audit a spanish class without having to pay for it.

I walked across the Manhattan Bridge today for the first time in my life. DUMBO, with its yuppie condos with rooftop tennis courts, is pretty ridiculous. The fis markets make the corner of East Broadway and Market Street smell like Ana and Jia Lynn's elevator. There's a point while walking across the bridge where if you look south it actually looks like the Statue of Liberty is standing on the Brooklyn Bridge. And at one point the Q Train was stopped on the tracks and people were staring out the windows at me, which was kind of fun. I'm such a narcissist.