dollhouse goes to college

Tonight's episode of Dollhouse read like page freaking 33 of Slaughter and Leslie's Academic Capitalism, "congealed intellectual labor" and all. As in Buffy Season 4 academic technoscience is sinister, but here the demons are us dude, (which was ultimately the point of Buffy as well, i suppose.) Unlike in Buffy we're not (yet) talking about the state - although the Dollhouse has infiltrated state agencies up the wazoo. Instead we get the relationship between the university, the shady biotech/pharma corporation, and the global conglomerate that erases animal rights' activists' brains and turns them into sex robot amnesiac rewriteable palimpsests. Instead of the military demonic academic complex it's an only slightly paranoid look at the nefarious entanglements of university patent offices and the politics of tech transfer and industrial espionage. Three Joss Whedon shows and three abused grad students - Buffy had Riley, so damaged by drug withdrawal and emasculation he pays vampires to bite him. Angel had Fred, thrown into a hell dimension by an advisor jealous of his student's superior command of theoretical physics, and dollhouse has the kid who beats his own skull to a pulp against the lab window tripping out on outsourced Dollhouse brain juice.

I'm writing this directly after the episode aired. I was not going to post about television again for a while, much less about a show i wrote quite a bit about last week, but the subject of this week's episode demanded otherwise. I may have more to say later or tomorrow or whenever I get the chance to rewatch the episode. In the meantime, it's back to the writing.

"Nothing is what it appears to be."

These are the first lines of the pilot of Joss Whedon's Dollhouse, the sixth episode of which will largely be ignored tonight, what with Battlestar Galactica ending and stuff, but Alyssa's written an interesting and thoughtful critique of the show for the Atlantic Monthly's website. (Awesomely, she interviews Whedon, who sounds exactly like Joss Whedon, which, as I already noted in this sentence, is awesome.)

Thus far, five episodes into the series, escapism has dominated the plotlines. In the premiere, Echo spent a hot weekend racing motorcycles, dancing, and having sex with a good-looking young man who treats her like a treasured girlfriend. In the second episode, she went rock-climbing and hunting with another hunk, who turned out to have a Most Dangerous Game fantasy. That’s a step closer to the risks of violence and coercion in human trafficking and sex work, but it’s not exactly realistic. And in the fourth episode, Echo pretended to be an abused prostitute to gain access to a vault full of valuable art she intends to steal. There’s something disturbing about using sympathy for victims of sexual violence to commit crimes, but the episode doesn’t explore whether we ought to be disgusted with someone—Echo’s client? Her handlers? Echo herself?—for designing and carrying out the con. There is no hint of the grubby realities of human trafficking, or of the intriguing alliance between feminism and evangelical Christianity that drives a great deal of anti-trafficking work in both the government and non-profit sectors.

Dollhouse could be a fascinating exploration of prostitution if Echo was able to consent, if she had a decision-making process we could assess and evaluate. And sex has been so large a part of Dollhouse that it threatens to drown out other facets of what once made Echo a person.

I share some of Alyssa's concerns regarding the sexual politics of how Dollhouse represents bodies which are, essentially, trafficked. Particularly in the non-Whedon-penned episodes, there's a very thin line between the revulsion and discomfort we're supposed to feel at the utter commodification not just of the "actives'" labor, or their bodies, but of their very identities, what someone more schooled in late twentieth century philosophical traditions than I would probably caution me against calling their "being." Alyssa's conversation with Whedon highlights these tensions to great effect. That said, I also want to map out some quick points of disagreement.

First, Alyssa says that Whedon and Tim Minear's Firefly " lacks a central conceit that ties it to contemporary American problems." I disagree with this. Firefly, produced in 2001 and 2002 and aired intermittently if at all over the course of 2002 before an abrupt and unjustified cancellation, was a space western, yes, but one which focused heavily (the 2005 follow up film Serenity even more so) on (inter)global corporate capitalism, on empire, on war, on piracy and margins and core-periphery post-wallersteinian world(s)-systems. Through subtle allegory, I want to argue that Firefly spoke and speaks directly to conversations about trade and development, rogue states and corporate power, the rule of experts and the tasking of bodies, which dominated political discourse in the decade before it aired, which recur in Dollhouse, and which remain deeply relevant seven years on.

This may seem like a nitpick, but I hope it also points us at a different way of reading Whedon, taking into account the warning that Olivia Williams' Adelle DeWitt, the Dollhouse's CEO, offers Caroline/Echo/Dushku in the series' opening moments. Alyssa is right to point toward the ways in which Dollhouse fails as an allegory for human trafficking, an important and deeply problematic form of labor arbitrage and migration in 21st century securitized global regimes of trade and work. But I want to argue that we also need to think about what it would mean to take Whedon at his word that he does not intend Dollhouse to be a show about trafficking, that trafficking operates in the show as a red herring for Agent Ballard to pursue in his attempt to discover the "real truth," something which is perhaps more sinister than and certainly altogether different than trafficking (a displacement Alyssa rightly identifies as uncomfortable) or which at least can not be easily represented and allegorized only under the sign of the human trafficking industry. That is not to say that I think it is wrong to consider the trafficking parallels, as Alyssa does very well, and to which Whedon himself admits, but, in light of the more tenuous, subtle ways in which Whedon and company have mobilized allegory in the past - i.e, not in the ripped from the headlines style of Battlestar Galactica (suicide bombers and cylon torture, etc) but instead through setting and how broader questions are framed, a more subtle and sometimes more effective symbolic politics than the law and order spin-off Whedon references in Alyssa's article.

I want, then, to suggest that we try, and hope that the show's writers will invite us (as they did in the pilot but not much since then), to read Dollhouse for the questions it raises about the gendering of digital virtualities, the commodification of life, the sexual politics of subject formation. What work does Whedon want mindwiping to do? What about it interests him as a story to tell, as, presumably, a metaphor for some contemporary cultural or social phenomena? What does this show, with its mindwiped pleasure dolls and action heroes, have to say about labor and knowledge, about how the corporation and the body and the computer are articulated together? And there are the broader questions of what Whedon et al want to achieve by destabilizing selfhood, placing us in a world where identities are in flux, cannot be trusted, are constructed and deconstructed and reconstructed in the most literal of ways. (And then of course, there's the theme, common to so much of Whedon's work, and which I am fascinated by, of the perverse politics of geek masculinities, feminized bodies as action figures, etc.) What if what's radical and important about Dollhouse is how compromised, how impossible "the real girl" is to recover? Wouldn't this radically decenter the kinds of privileged first world femininities Whedon's been criticized for reproducing and valorizing at the expense of, say, Kendra the short-lived mimetic Jamaican Vampire Slayer? I'm sure someone more versed in gender theory than I could rip me to shreds right now, and I have a lot of work I need to do (not sure when I'll even be able to watch either the dollhouse episode or the BSG finale,) but I'll end by saying that I think Alyssa has done us an enormous service by critically engaging Whedon's latest work, and I look forward to seeing what happens both with the series and with the critical dialogue which surrounds it.

EDIT: Further troubling any attempt to define "the real girl," for me, is the extent to which the show, at least in the pilot, frames itself as a direct critique of reality tv - the dollhouse itself as something like a combination of the real world house, with jobs assigned depending on the producers' whims, and the big brother house with constant surveillance and intrigue, etc. The reason the real echo is so elusive is that representations of reality are precisely what the show is trying to tackle.

I spent most of the day in the panopticon, reading Thomas Sugrue's Sweet Land of Liberty instead of grading. Watched the latest episode of Battlestar Galactica on the long subway ride home, and holy fuck (I had to sit down on my couch and not do anything for like five minutes after i finished it to let my heart slow down), and then read the kakistotle (that's a greek joke. aristotle from aristos, best, kakistos=worst, also a demon in buffy season three.) I like the Sugrue book a lot, narrative but also theoretically grounded and both deeply enmeshed in the archive and demonstrating widespread knowledge of recent historiography of the long civil rights movement. I would like to see him engage more directly with some of Nikhil Singh's critiques of a few of the figures and movements he discusses, but maybe that's another book?

The ontario provincial government has ordered striking York U graduate employees in CUPE 3903 to return to work, and the workers are returning without a contract. This is no resolution.

Some folks from the Republic Window Workers' Strike stopped by Judson yesterday and it was inspiring to hear firsthand abotu what went down and what the struggle and the victory meant to the folks who fought and won it. Kudos to jobs with justice for making folks submit questions on index cards to minimize the sectarian rostrum hoggers. I sat behind the folks from DWU and next to the dissident TWU contingent, which was interesting. Ed Ott is pretty awesome as CLC presidents go. Oh, btw, Boycott Stella D'Oro. The factory, oddly enough, is a couple blocks away from where i went to high school. They tried to force the workers to accept some severe cutbacks and workers have been on strike for nearly six months.

procrastinare semper

A couple things as i work through my exam - i wrote three thousand words on Wednesday and about 1800 since. I like what i've written, but i'm not sure if it's exam-ish enough.

First, in response to Alyssa's contention that Indiana Jones and Star Wars are no places to look for political praxis, I want to agree and renew my suggestion that we instead look towards Buffy. Here I am speaking not only of season 4 (Smash the corporate/military/demonic university!) btu also season three, for blowing up (metaphorically) the schools and the giant snakes inside them seems a fairly accurate representation of my political and academic projects over the past nine years (since the founding of the Fieldston Revolutionary Anarchist Collective of Activist Students (FRACAS).) Graduation Day pts 1. and 2., like much of Season 7, are about organizing, about making connections, about challenging folks, pushing folks, about mass armed uprisings at scholastic graduations. Err, um, scratch the last part? And for any FBI, i reaffirm my commitment to bourgie ass nonviolent direct action blah blah blah.

Second, it's friday. Random shuffle: (from a new ipod i haven't burned all my cd collection onto yet. (I go to 20 because i haven't done this in a while)

1. Som Nosso, "Pra Swingar," from Baile Funk 1: The Brazilian Beat Mix.

2. Moldy Peaches "Anyone else but you." From The Moldy Peaches. Enh.

3.The Fatback Band, "Backstrokin' ," from Hustle! The Ultimate Fatback 1969-1984

4.Crass, "Bloody Revolutions" from Best Before 1984

5. Dead Kennedys. "Stealing People's Mail." from Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables (and i only just got the joke in the album title now, after owning it for god knows how long.)

6. The Coup, "ShoYoAss." from Pick A Bigger Weapon. Best song on the album by far.

7. Bob Marley, "Downpressor" from The Complete Bob Marley & The Wailers 1967-1972 Part 2
Actually Peter Tosh singing on this dub version, not surprisingly, since it's his song.

8.Grant McLennan, "Lighting Fires" from Intermission Great song. Requiescat in pace.

9.Little Milton "More &More". From Chicago Soul: Electric Blues Funk & Soul

10. Milton Nascimento, "Saidas E Bandeiras," from Clube Moderno Esquina Do Mundo (Scroll Down)

11. The Beatles - "I'm Only Sleeping." from Revolver.

12. The Dramatics - "In The Rain." from Stax 50th Anniversary Celebration and like twelve billion other compilations.

13. Robert Zimmerman. "A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall." From The Freewheelin Bob Dylan.

14. Exploding Hearts - "Boulevard Trash," from Guitar Romantic

15, Laura Lee. "Mama's Got a Good Thing." from Chicago Soul: Electric Blues Funk & Soul

16. The Moovers "I love you baby," from Eccentric Soul: The Deep City Label

17. The (International) Noise Conspiracy: "The Way I Feel About You" from Armed Love

18. Us, "Let's Do It Today" from Midwest Funk: Funk 45s from Tornado Alley

19. Fela Kuti, "Zombie" from Zombie

20. I-Roy, "Look a Boom" from Don't Check Me With No Lightweight Stuff

“You Can’t Stop the Signal,” or Preserving Our Television Future: Firefly, Serenity, and the politics of televisuality and cinema

(A paper i just handed in. Felt like it belonged here. Rereading it, there's some stuff that I didn't do particularly well. The stuff on Star Trek is indebted to a conversation i had with a colleague a few weeks ago, who actually works on and deals with the subject critically, and rather brilliantly.)

In the fall of 2002, the Fox network premiered Firefly, a new one-hour drama from writer, director and producer Joss Whedon, who had created and written the original screenplay for (but later disassociated himself from) the postmodern b-movie Buffy the Vampire Slayer and created the one hour WB/UPN drama of the same name, which was critically acclaimed for its feminist explorations of the horror genre’s metaphorical relationships to the spatiality of high school and suburbia, and the emotional and affective politics of adolescence and beyond. Whedon, who also spun off from Buffy in the fall of 1999 the pseudo-noirish Angel, which, according to audiocommentaries by Whedon and cocreator David Greenwalt, attempted to explore the experience of urban 20something aporia, again through genre horror conventions, is the son and grandson of television writers, and has been depicted as a pop auteur by film critics – the New York Times called him “the king of Geek T.V.”[1] Buffy aired for seven seasons and remains in syndication multiple times a day on the FX network. Angel was canceled in 2004 after five seasons, the last of them without Buffy to inflate its ratings, and is syndicated twice a day on TNT. Only 11 episodes of Firefly ever aired in the show’s (original network) run. Three more episodes made it onto the series’ posthumous DVD collection. Last year it was made into a $39 million dollar sequel of sorts, the Universal Studios film Serenity, and the series is now prominently featured as a digital download on Apple’s iTunes and Amazon.com’s Unbox. That a television show canceled after half a season, its episodes often shown out of order and haphazardly, interrupted by multi-week or month hiatuses, was ever issued on DVD, let alone made into a wide-release feature film demonstrates starkly the power of DVD and new technologies of viewing, consuming, and participating in visual culture.

Firefly is a sci-fi/western drama centered on a group of rogue smugglers navigating the poor, anarchic, underdeveloped fringes of a galactic empire in a syncretic, postwar moment of inequality and repression. The captain and first mate of the ship Serenity are veteran ex-soldiers on the losing side of a rebellion against the Anglo-Sino Alliance in the far future, in which humanity, having long since exhausted earth’s natural resources, has colonized and terraformed the galaxy, with the rich and powerful living in an corporate utopia of technology and abundance on the core planets, and the destitute and downtrodden unceremoniously deposited on the barely terraformed fringes of the system, left with next to nothing and forced to survive however they can, and menaced by the spectre of the unnasimilable Other, the crazed, psychotic, maniacal reavers – people who have been driven inexplicably and homicidally insane on the edges of space. (We learn in the film that this “something” which has produced the reavers is in effect the horror of modernization, of modernity itself.) The series often employs tropes of the frontier, and genre conventions of both science fiction and the Western, to explore themes of imperialism, colonialism, globalization, and terror. (The first episode aired just over a week after the one year anniversary of September 11, 2001, and the construction of the reaver as the enemy of civilization driven mad by its violence and haunting its edges seems particularly potent when read in such a context – the reaver as an iteration of the monster-terrorist-fag invoked recently by Jasbir Puar and Amit S. Rai[2], a “screen for otherness” through which a “multiform power operates”.)

Those Firefly episodes Fox did air in 2002-2003 were presented out of order. The two-hour series premiere, which introduced the characters and world of the series, was jettisoned in favor of the second episode, which had to then be reworked as an auxiliary pilot. This left viewers and critics like the Times’ Caryn James thoroughly perplexed.[3] The pilot was only aired after the series had been dropped, five days before Christmas and while the rest of the network schedule was on hiatus. Nevertheless, the series was cancelled despite outcry from loyal fans, who found something compelling in the show’s characters, dialogue (peppered with idiosyncratic witticisms and mandarin expletives,) and dystopian vision of a sci-fi future in which the enemy is not some alien menace or mystical force, but rather injustices and inequities which are very much human and very familiar to twenty-first century viewers (as Whedon has pointed out on DVD audiocommentaries.)

As with fans of Buffy, Firefly aficionados were disproportionately women in a genre often understood as a masculinist space in which relationships to texts, themes, and characters have been (problematically) understood as hypermasculine, and infused with “testosterone” – specifically the pleasure of watching characters engage in activities suffused with antifeminine gravitas, often in the form of fantastic or hyperreal violence.[4] Perhaps this is because of the (arguably postmodern) rejection within the series and film of salvific and progressive grand narratives more common in standard genre fare. In the Star Trek franchise, the Intergalactic Federation’s explorations of terra incognita form a heroic liberal narrative of discovery and encounter. In Firefly and Serenity, the Federation’s analogue is a sometimes tragic and sometimes malevolent agent of empire, suffering, and catastrophe. Conservative pundit Jonah Goldberg has hailed the film as an exemplar of Randian objectivism,[5] but if Malcolm Reynolds is a “capitalist,” where is the surplus value? The crew of Serenity is constantly flying by the seat of its pants, barely scraping together enough fuel and parts to stay afloat on the long routes of interplanetary travel, and kept in the air largely because of the ingenuity of its pilot, engineer, and captain. While often trying to acquire capital, such money is almost always spent on ship maintenance and food, and the crew often works pro bono or gives what it has earned to the needy, existing on a criminalized continuum between “independent contractor” and migrant worker, frequently inhabiting a “robin hood” identity, which, if libertarian and anti-state, is also profoundly anti-capitalist. The film is more productively read through the lenses of postcolonial theory, autonomous Marxist historiography (a la Linebaugh and Rediker, -- the western outlaw as insurgent pirate,) and perhaps radical anarchist political theory, as a chronicle of a hybrid, syncretic, motley crew of rogues and misfits struggling against not only the state, but the sinister Blue Sun corporation, (which performs hideous experiments on one of the main characters in order to transform her into a living bioweapon,) and “progress” itself, embracing an anti-utopian, immanent praxis of permanent rebellion.[6]

The series was released as a four-DVD boxed set less than a year after the pilot finally aired, in part because of, and in order to capitalize upon the demand from fans. To date, half a million copies of the DVD have been sold, and the series is ranked #29 in the amazon.com dvd store.[7] The robust sales convinced Universal that the show might be worth resurrecting as a feature film, and Whedon prefaced special preview screenings of the film for activist fans with an emotional “thank you” later included on the DVD release of the film. But lest we rush to attribute these sales and this activist relation to televisual culture to Whedon’s authorial virtuousity and exceptionalism, we would do well to remember that this sequence of events occurred in the context of a booming business in Television on DVD[8] – and not only Kompare’s nostalgia-saturated “old” shows from previous decades. It is now commonplace for seasons of current series – like The O.C., Grey’s Anatomy, and Veronica Mars to be released on DVD only three or four months after they finish airing. Similarly, there has been a steady demand for TV shows which were critically lauded or cult successes but canceled by their network – Firefly is exemplary, but so are Freaks and Geeks, Undeclared, and Wonderfalls. Fan mobilizations, mostly internet-based, to prolong or resurrect series like Family Guy, Veronica Mars, and Arrested Development have been widely chronicled in industry press and major newspapers. This activist relationship between fans and networks/studios evinces a new dimension of the increasing importance of home viewing and an aggressive fandom centered not on the theatre, but on practices of viewing centered in domestic spaces which Barbara Klinger explores in the first two chapters of Beyond The Multiplex. The success of Family Guy in DVD and reruns led to the production of new episodes after a several-year hiatus. But the story of Firefly and Serenity is in part the story of a repackaging so successful and powerful that it invaded the multiplex, imagining and enacting a reversal of the usual trajectory of cinema release to home video and possible TV spinoff (as was, after all, the case with Buffy.) Fans of the series and film are now clamoring for either a sequel film or new TV episodes, possibly distributed over the internet or via a netflix-like mailing system.[9]

One final point that must be raised in relation to the DVD reissues of series like Firefly is how the interpretive schema of the DVD boxed set as a repackaging of history and attempted legitimization of the cultural product at hand as artistic masterpiece or cultural treasure must be reconfigured given the circumstances of their reception – many, if not most viewers of the DVDs encountered the show for the first time in their rerelease, particularly before the Sci-Fi Channel began re-airing the entire series (in the correct order) in July, 2005. The popularity of the DVDs may have less to do with the fetishization of television “heritage” as national past-ness than with a desire to instead resist the foreclosure of possible futures for television and employ complex practices of meaning-making (fan sites, fan fiction, and the fan-produced scripts for “Buffy: Season 8”[10] floating around on the internet) and activist tactics to extend the lives of favorite characters and series on and off screen. I don’t mean to be utopian here – (whatever would the crew of Serenity think?) – but instead to suggest, or rather confirm Klinger’s suggestion, that the Networks have either sufficiently colonized fan cultures or been sufficiently colonized by them that these processes are anything but alternative, and instead very much a part of how TV studios measure and produce success.

---

[1] “The King of Geek T.V. Gets Big Screen Comeback,” NYT, September 25, 2005

[2] Puar and Rai, “Monster, Terrorist. Fag: The War on Terror and the Production of Docile Patriots,” Social Text 72, Vol. 20, No. 3, Fall 2002.

[3] Caryn James, “TV Weekend: Fantasy of Future and the Here and Now,” NYT, 9/20/2002, and http://imdb.com/title/tt0303461/episodes

[4] See Klinger, Beyond The Multiplex, 148-149

[5]

[6] An anarchist reading of Whedon’s work is suggested both by scholars like David Graeber, (“Rebel Without a God,” In These Times 12/27/1998)and by dialogue in Buffy itself, when a military colonel refers to the slayer and her friends as “anarchists,” and Buffy’s boyfriend Riley does the same, reclaiming the term in a positive light. (This is in the Season 4 Episode “New Moon Rising, which aired in 2000.)

[7] “Firefly alights on big screen as Serenity” USA TODAY, 9/21/2005 and amazon.com

[8] As evinced and supported by websites like tvshowsondvd.com

[9] i.e., http://www.browncoatsriseagain.com/ and http://www.fireflyseason2.com/index.asp

[10] See Buffyworld.com. The show ended after the conclusion of the 7^th season.

By The Time You're 25

The title of this post is a reference, first, to a rather wonderful Sleater-Kinney B-Side from the "Get Up" single, and second, to the fact that as of four days ago, I number among the ranks of the "25 and over" set. My feelings about this are mixed. On the one hand, it's been a fun couple of days. The trip to the zoo was loads of fun. I could have stayed there and watched the otters play around for hours. I got to hang out quite a bit with friends and family, and the cohort took me out to dinner last night, which was equally awesome.

But I often feel like the last few years have slipped through my fingers - kind of a "how the fuck did I get to be 25/when did that happen" moment, i guess. 23, after all, was a near total wash, and I don't really feel like i got out of 24 what I wanted to. And now I'm halfway through my twenties with no money, and what I suspect is not much of a better idea of how to be an adult in any positive sense of the term than I had when I was 21 or 22. And that's a little scary, because as much as i could concievably spend the rest of my life playing World of Warcraft or rewatching Buffy DVDs, that strikes me (no pun intended) as a pretty defeatist scenario, and I would like to - no. fuck that, I need to figure out how to actually participate in struggles for social justice in meaningful ways. And I would also like to figure out how to build/find a community here in the city that I feel comfortable in but that challenges me to be a better organizer/researcher/academic/whatever and a better person. The idea of struggling through all this shit into my 30s is kind of scary, and 30 doesn't feel anywhere near as distant as it did a year ago. Grad school, i guess, will do that to you.

I think i'm being overly melodramatic. But hey, at least you got something mildly substantive, right? I haven't been a good blogger lately either, i guess.

So give me a spark I can look for instead

My favorite band is breaking up. I feel understandably sad about this. But I'm glad that in eleven years they made seven incredible albums that I listen to almost every day. If the Woods is the last album they ever make, I'm glad that "Night Light" is the conclusion to their catalogue, achingly beautiful and obstinately hopeful. I'm glad that I got to see them three times (the show at the 2002 Siren Music Festival remains the single best set by any band I have ever seen,) and I'm glad I have my ticket to what may be their second-to-last show ever on Aug. 2 at Webster Hall. But I'm still getting all teary eyed, even if I'm not ready to say goodbye yet.




Yesterday, when I wrote that Buffy failed to address race, I neglected to discuss "Pangs," in which a vengeful Chumash spirit gives Xander syphylis and kills a bunch of people and Giles, SPike, Willow, and Buffy get into a stupid fight about political correctness and the legacies of colonial genocide. It's a horrible episode - certainly Jane Espenson's worst for the series - way worse than "First Date," Ashanti and all, and symbolizes for me the failure of the show to address race in a meaningful and valuable way. Plus, the cheap Angel tie-in is stupid, Riley is a doof, and the only good thing about the episode is Anya's constant babbling about sex with Xander, which is actually pretty awesome. Well, the other good thing about pangs is that it provides one of Anya's funniest lines in the song "I'll Never Tell" during the amazing season six musical epic-sode Once More With Feeling. That will have to do for now.

Oh, also, this is awesome.

In These Times takes on Veronica Mars

Christopher Hayes hagiographizes VM as scenes from the class struggle in Neptune, albeit with the ambivalences and complexities of beaucoup de "Stockholm Syndrome" (great Yo La Tengo song, by the way.) I'm trying to churn out some very overdue reading responses and failing miserably at the moment - probably need to get out of the library and work at home for the afternoon, but I'll take a few first to post some of my own thoughts on the class politics of Veronica Mars, which I find somewhat more problematic than Hayes does.

Class fissures lie at the core of Rob Thomas's fictional Southern Californian drama. Veronica and her father are declasse flotsam in a "town without a middle class," in which you are either fantastically wealthy or you scrub the toilets of the people who are. Hayes argues that the series deftly explores the pathologies of class and the antagonsims and resentments of those who look upward from beneath the impenetrable glass ceiling.

Yet i question this analysis on several grounds. First, Neptune's class politics are themselves deeply fanciful. The rich are rich because they were magically swept along in the dotcom boom or made a lot of bad movies. The corporate criminal (Richard Casablancas) is the rare exception. Most of Neptune's nouveau are simply the honest beneficiaries of Jake Kane's streaming video patents. Class is a striation, a marker of difference, here, which functions like a dehistoricized ethnic category or mystical syncretic racial identity rather than as a structure of exploitation. To hypothesize that class difference breeds resentment is not a particulary revolutionary suggestion, yet this is what Hayes thinks is so wonderful about the show and this is the thrust of his article. Yet Veronica Mars fails to present a more nuanced articulation of what class is and how it works. The dehistoricization and mythologization of Neptune's class politics at times makes the series into a sort of Windfall noir. But more importantly, confine class to a manifestation of difference and even inequality but not a structure of exploitation. Though there are moments when the world of the wealthy and the Weevil are tantalizingly intertwined - especially in the series's second episode - for the most part the series understands the underclass as atomized detritus severed from the Whopper McMansions of the elite save for some Crash-styl;e moments of crisis and the occasional Ellisonian Bumfight.

Unlike Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the show's antecedent, which offered what i believe was a more nimble and less stereotyped, if quieter exploration of high school as a central locus of the imaginary of American cultural production, Veronica Mars attempts to deal with race as an ordering mechanism and social force in the lives of Neptune's inhabitants. If Buffy's Sunnydale seems to exist outside the racialized faultlines of California politics for the most part, (with the possible exception of "desde abajo te devora,") Veronica's Neptune seems at first glance to rest solidly at the epicenter of the tremors of violent racialized political exclusion, exploitation, and reaction. From Logan and Dick's racist banter to the sneers of the corrupt, self-aggrandizing Sherriff Lamb, to the machinations of Celeste Kane, the thrillseeking "jungle fever" of Paris Hilton Caitlyn Ford, or Weevil's chivalrous defense of Carmen, Racialized frictions and fissures are constitutive forces in Neptune's social imaginary. Yet Veronica's racial politics not only suffer from a dehistoricized and toothless multiculturalism, but also seem at times to employ problematic, even racist constructions of peoplehood in order to attain an "iconic" representation of southern California which all too often instead stumbles into the clumsy stereotypes of CSI and Law and Order and the criminalizing gaze of Cops. There are also moments where the series does exactly the opposite, and I don't want anyone to mistake me for someone who doesn't think that the show's first season is absolutely fantastic (well, except for the resolution of "A Trip to The Dentist," which was a total and deeply fucked-up cop out of dealing with sexual violence in a serious and complex way.) And whatever my disgust with the many failures of the sophomore season, I will continue to watch season 3 religiously. But if we are going to talk about the class politics of the series, I think our tone has to be much more meditative and critical than that which Hayes adopts.

(As an aside, I played Ollman's Class Struggle board game with Will and Cathy in college. I was the students, and I was allied to the workers. Somehow, I won, which is against the game's rules, but I guess we were playing a post-Seattle variant or something.)

Hunger strikers win card check at University of Miami!

The parties agreed to conduct an impartial process to verify whether a
majority of employees are interested in collective bargaining representation by
the SEIU. At least 60 percent of the workers must vote in favor of unionizing by
August 1, 2006 for UNICCO to recognize the union. Under terms of the agreement,
a card-check verification process will be conducted by a neutral third party,
the American Arbitration Association.
***
The dispute at Miami has become a focal point for labor activists and
political leaders nationwide who want to help low-income workers at colleges,
especially at institutions that outsource work to companies. The dispute at
Miami follows major student activism on behalf of janitors at Washington University in St. Louis and helped encourage
activists at the University of Virginia, among other campuses.
At an
impromptu celebratory gathering after the agreement was released, several
janitors said they were excited to vote to join SEIU. Most make less than
$11,000 a year for a full eight hours of work each day and do not have health
insurance.
Throughout the school year, students had worked
hard to support the janitors, joining in rallies and participating in hunger
strikes. “Student support was instrumental,” said Asher. “They shared a vision
with the janitors on how to make this university a just place.”

This is so inspirational, and sucjh a huge victory. I'm at a loss for words. Congratulations to all the people who fought so hard for so long for this.

I don't have any pictures from yesterday's rally, but it was amazing, completely filling Union Square. Favorite chant, other than the perennial "Bush, escucha, estamos en la lucha!" was "No somos cero. No somos cien. Somos milliones, cuenta nos bien!" (Apologies for lack of accents.)

While paper-writing this weekend i took intermittent Buffy breaks, finishing season 2 and beginning season 3. Season 3 remains my favorite. It's epic in a way that even season 2 never was for me. It's the moment where high school assumes a mythic quality but also feels far more "lived in" than in the previous two seasons, partially because of Oz and the increasing prominence of the supporting cast (Jonathan, Amy, Schneider, Harmony, Larry, et al.) I'll freely admit that part of the reason I love the third season is the huge freaking revolt at the end, but there's such a wealth of storylines and so many incredible episodes. That said, rewatching "Becoming, Pt. 2," the season 2 finale, I found the episode far more moving than I have the last couple of times I've seen it. Not only does it set up "Anne," which is easily the show's best season premiere ever, but it's somethig of a perfect climax for the orgy of pathos that is season 2, and the buffy-joyce scenes are pretty priceless.

working on presentation for tomorrow on really interesting book about writing instruction and casualization.

Today is the beginning of month six of the strike. Had a long talk with my roomate about race at Yale, sparked by all the shit at Duke. Had a much less consequential talk with someone in one of my classes in the library about Buffy, Sports Night, the RNC, and grad school. Had lunch with my mom.

Excited about the march tomorrow even if i'll miss the GSOC contingent's feeder from Washington Square Park due to aforementioned presentation. I want reportbacks. I always want reportbacks. I swear I'll post something substantial at some point. For now, i leave you with the following opinions on popular music.

1.Destroyer's Rubies is probably the best solo Dan Bejar stuff i have ever heard. I didn't get much out of Your Blues and didn't even buy the last one, but this is a fantastic cd.

2.The new Yeah Yeah Yeahs is really dissappointing and sounds like they just decided to cover "maps" and/or "modern romance" badly on like 10 of the 11 songs. A lot of what made me like the band in the first place, the punch of songs like "Art Star" and "Rich" and "Pin" and "Y Control" is just not here and it makes for kind of a bland record.

3.I really like The Bush Tetras. The Gang of Four influence is really clear, but they sing about stuff in such markedly different ways, and listening to them it becomes clear how influential they've been for a whole subgenre of politicized post-post-punk a la Sleater-Kinney. Although, apparently, so was "King of Rock."

You really need to watch this.

When Things Get Rough, He Just Hides Behind His Buffy

Woke up later than I wanted to, took the train rather than walking to Manhattan because of the crappy weather, (watched the latest episode of Veronica Mars on my Ipod though, which was kind of nice) read about casualization (Slaughter and Roades, Washburn, Aronowitz, and a piece on the NYU adjunct organizing from Social Text 70,) hopped on train, came home, felt lonely and alienated (completely of my own doing, so no right complaining,) and turned to "Welcome To The Hellmouth" for consolation before I start working on my presentation for monday.
Wow, pointless entry. How retro!

around the line in 80 days

Recalculation suggests that Phil Wheeler was right yesterday, and that today is in fact the 80th day of the strike, about halfway through the twelfth week. I was supposed to go to a film screening early this morning, but i was tired enough from all yesterday's sturm and drang that I wound up making it to campus half an hour late and concluding that it would be much more useful of me to join the picket line rather than to go and try to see the movie of which i'd already missed the first half-hour. It was freezing cold, and i was a bit frustrated with myself for not wearing more socks or another layer of shirtyness. (That was kind of a Buffy reference, i think.) There are two pictures from the march on the front page of the WSN today, one of the crowd in profile marching beneath the arch, and this one:


I talked to some reporters today for the first time since coming here. One was writing a story about NYU's changes to Washington Square Park, and i guess wanted a striker perspective, and another was writing an opinion piece about the strike. I'm not sure what her opinion is, but I feel like I was on message enough that even if she's secretly like Jamie Kirchick in disguise, which didn't seem likely - she seemed non-fascist, but you can never tell - I didn't give her much to go on and policed myself, i hope, adequately enough

So what you're saying is...

...that Friends really is an accurate representation of the gentrified yuppie LES life? I've been suggesting that this may be the case since high school, but nevertheless I'm finding this article more than a little bizarre. I'm sure it's doing wonders for Piper Perabo's career though.

I had serious apprehensions about moving back to NYC after college and staying here for grad school. In the former case i didn't really have anywhere else to go and I thought I'd be able to find work faster in New York. Ha. My reservations about staying here were all about gentrification and the way this city is so good at atomizing people and ripping them apart, unless, that is, you want to build an isolated incestuous sitcom "life serial" (to swipe a phrase from the Buffy) instead of a broader and more responsive relationship with the city you live in (and, in my case, where you grew up.) There are days when i wish i'd gone to the west coast or midwest or found some way to stay in New Haven or spent some time "someplace that's else." But, on the other hand, with the strike, i feel like there's an opportunity to find/build a relationship with this city which i feel like i haven't had since high school or maybe since i was doing the internship almost four years ago with Local 100. (HERE, not TWU, in case anyone was wondering.) So hopefully we can all figure out a way to help make new York something more than a yuppified Giulianified amusement park that poor folks can't afford to live in but have to migrate several hours to every day in order to work low-wage, contingent jobs for massively powerful corporations like Domino Sugar and garment sweatshops and New York University.

..."and you're history!:" Buffy vs. The University

Being a semi-procrastinatory interlude from paper writing, in which i dispense on Buffy and academe.

In season four of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the eponymous (is that the correct usage?)protagonist, having, the previous spring, blown up her high school in order to kill the gigantic snake demon into which the mayor of Sunnydale transformed himself, begins college at the (obviously fictional) UC Sunnydale. In her first days of college, Buffy has to deal with feelings of inadequacy as a student, gets yelled out of a lecture hall by a sexist cultural studies professor on her first day of classes, and must fend off the soul-sucking advances of a demon roomate, who doesn't pee on floors, but does listen to copious amounts of Celine Dion and attempts to siphon off Buffy's life force while she sleeps. A couple of months into the semester, Buffy starts dating her Psychology TA, a strapping young grad student from Iowa named Riley Finn, who is secretly not only a graduate student but a steroidally-enhanced commando secret agent working for the shadowy military initiative operating beneath the campus, which is attempting to control, breed, and harness Sunnydale's demonic population for covert military uses.

No one bats an eye over the fact that Riley is dating Buffy while he is grading her work. The writers at times seem unsure of whether he is a graduate student or simply an older undergraduate - he refers to himself as a "psychology major," but Buffy observes in a later episode, "you know, there's nothing more dangerous than a psych grad student". Later, after he says something ridiculously cheesy to Professor Walsh, she refers to Riley as a "college boy in love." The list goes on, but let's operate under the presumption that, despite the fact than in many psych departments (as is the case at NYU,) undergrads are TAed by other undergrads, while PhD students tend to TA Masters courses, Riley is a graduate student.

Riley and his buds know all the ins and outs about which undergrads on campus are dating each other and which upperclassmen prove to be total man-skanks. They live in frat-houses-cum-secret-government laboratories and hold frat parties at which undergrad bands play. Now, i have never attended a large state university like the fictional UC Sunnydale, and I don't really know what grad student life is like there, but i kind of doubt that a teaching assistant would tell one of his undergraduates he barely knows about the sexual habits of another undergrad, much less know anything about said habits. But then again, I'm not a TA yet, and won't be ever if i don't finish these damn papers. Nevertheless, this is one of the few things over the course of the series that the writers simply get wrong. I posit that graduate students are something of a semi-subaltern category in Buffy who can be integrated into the show's representative schema of university life only as older undergrads with secret lives who occasionally grade papers and dress up in camoulflage. This is not the same kind of subalternity as that occupied, say, by the high school lunchlady in the Season 3 episode "Earshot," in which said food service employee only becomes visible and audible when she attempts to murder all the students by pouring rat poison in the Jello mixture, chases down Xander with a butcher's knife, and is beaten senseless by Buffy. Instead, following Kathy Newman's analysis of 90210 and other texts, Buffy constructs TAs as potential objects of romantic attachment and also calculating and dissimulating, posessing hybrid and shifting identities, suspended between graduations, and between the university and the military-industrial complex which sits, quite literally, beneath it.

(We will skip over entirely Maggie Walsh, our tenured(?) psych professor/murderous mad military scientist,whose secret project is to create "Adam," a hybrid subject, of sorts, assembled from computers (complete with floppy disk drives) and the body parts of humans, vampires, and demonic entities.)

Newman links representations in Marathon Man to the early years of the explosion of casualization of teaching. She then turns to the college years of Beverly Hills 90210, exploring the politics of social and sexual reproduction in the academy between Brandon, Dylan, et. al. and their shady/sketchy TAs during the early years of GESO's organizing campaign. "Beware graduate students - they might study something useless, kill you, or seduce your children." ("Poor, Hungry, and Desperate? Or Privileged, Histrionic, and Demanding? In Search of the True Meaning of 'Ph. D.'" Kathy M. Newman. Social Text, No. 49, The Yale Strike Dossier. (Winter, 1996), pp. 97-131.)

The fourth season of Buffy began airing in the fall of 1999 and ended in the fall of 2000. (Riley's story, in which, feeling taken for granted by an otherwise occupied Vampire Slayer, the now ex-graduate student, ex-commando becomes addicted to dangerous intercourse with the undead and leaves Sunnydale to hunt monsters in South America, concluded midway through the fifth season, in an episode which aired in December of 2000.) These years were tumultous and crucial in the shifting dynamics of academic capitalism and the social construction of graduate employees. They saw new arrangements of casualization - adjunctization, "postdoc"ization, etc., and renewed organizing at several private universities and a series of National Labor Relations Board decisions which ultimately granted workers at NYU and other private universities the status of "worker" and the right to Wagner act protections concerning organizing and bargaining. Buffy the Vampire Slayer's deft exploration of the logics and contradictions of secondary schooling through metaphor and parody has been repeatedly noted by critics and scholars, but the deep skepticism in the post-high school years over the politics, entanglements, and assumptions of contemporary universities demands deeper inquiry.

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]

Graeber on Buffy

Traditional vampire movies are a variation. In a way, they are ultimately
about the failure of the French Revolution--which was supposed to kill off all
those bloodsucking aristocrats in their castles and usher in a rational world of
liberty, equality, fraternity and enlightened commercial self-interest. Of
course it didn't work. The Count refuses to stay dead. Because deep inside, the
movies suggest, we don't really want him to. Eroticized cruelty and domination
keep resurfacing because they are rooted in the very nature of our desires.
Again, the proof is in the audience.
Yet Buffy not only avoids such sadistic
pleasures, it openly mocks the underlying morality:

Buffy: (Trying to bluff her way into a fundamentalist church) You
know, I just... I woke up and I looked in the mirror and I thought, hey! What's
with all this sin? I need to change! I'm... I'm dirty. I'm... Bad, with the sex,
and the envy and that loud music us kids listen to nowadays. (Blank stares.)
(Sigh.) Oh, I just suck at undercover. Where's Ken? (Kicks down door.)

In fact, its moral premise is precisely the opposite. Vampire-slaying has
to be kept secret. As a result, almost everyone in Sunnydale believes Buffy and
company are juvenile delinquents: violent, lazy, irresponsible, disobedient.
Bad. In reality, they are almost unimaginably self-sacrificing and good. In this
sense, Buffy is a kind of anti-horror.

The godless cosmology is something that's been developing for a long time,
across anything from superhero comic books to Dungeons and Dragons. What I
really want to draw attention to, however, is the underlying ethic. It would be
hard to imagine a healthier one. People--most people, anyway--mean well, but
being good is difficult (Buffy characters are always fretting over whether they
really did the right thing) and power tends to make you stupid or insane. It's a
difficult ethos to maintain in an adventure fantasy. After all, the whole point
of such fantasies is, usually, to fabricate a situation where there is an
obvious right thing to do--even more, where that right thing involves sorts of
violent behavior that would otherwise be wrong. Therein lies the pleasure. It's
not that Buffy doesn't do this: We are still talking about a show about
teenagers killing demons. But even the fantasy element has a sort of wistful
quality.

If nothing else, Buffy reminds us how much '60-style youth rebellion was
premised on an assumption of security and prosperity: Why put up with all this
stodginess when life could be so good? Today's rebellious youth, rather, are
reduced to struggling desperately to keep hell from entirely engulfing the
earth. Such, I suppose, is the fate of a generation that has been robbed of its
fundamental right to dream of a better world. The very notion of being able to
take part in a relatively democratically organized group of comrades, engaged in
a struggle to save humanity from its authoritarian monsters, is now itself a
wild utopian fantasy--not just a means to one. But cynics take note: If the
mushrooming success of Buffy means anything, it's that this is one fantasy which
surprising numbers of the Slacker Generation do have.

-In These Times, 1998

This blog is not a union blog. The opinions herein do not represent those of any union, not the least GSOC, of which i am a member. GSOC cares about things like the future of the academy and winning just contracts, whereas i write about things like baby pandas and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. So please don't interpret any of these rants as anything other than what they are. Thanks.

i got nine hundred problems

but leisure ain't one. This is post 900, if that was too subtle. yay for me.
Here's some Panda crotch.

Today's wednesday, and it's after five, which means i'm done with classes for the week, which means i now have to start reading for next week's classes. Before then, though, I wanted to blog for a little about nothing in particular. I could talk about how i feel really intimidated and stupid in all my classes and have no idea what teh fuck i am doing. But i'm not going to do that. (Praeteritio!) I could blog about Hurricane Rita and I hope folks get safe and make sure that people who can't leave have immediate assistance and support, but no, instead i think i'm going to blog, first, about fall tv premieres. Specifically i'm interested in three series featuring former cast members of Buffy and Freaks and Geeks. "Kitchen Confidential" stars a bunch of people i have never seen before and don't like very much, and John Cho of Harold and Kumar fame, who is a pretty good comedic actor. But it also co-stars Nicholas Brendon, who played Xander in every single episode of Buffy except the one he isn't in, and John Francis Daly, who brilliantly played one of the protagonists in Freaks and Geeks back when he was a lot more prepubescent. Both of them don't really factor too much in the first episode, which is unfortunate, because the series itself isn't particularly good. Dumb racist and sexist jokes, ("Tyrone, you're a walking can opened; this man is a chef") hackneyed extremities in food humor, etc. Also it was directed by Fred Savage, and badly.

"How I Met Your Mother" has another actor who was in Harold and Kumar, Neil Patrick Doogie Harris. It also features voice overs from Bob Saget. But again, not really giving a crap. It co-stars Alyson Hannigan and Jason Segel though, so i decided to watch the premiere. Cliche romantic comedy, brazenly orientalist fetishization of lebanese women, but Hannigan is wonderful. Segel is amazing at playing hapless masculinists, half-enearing, half-sketchy male characters whose attitudes towards the objects of their affections are possessive and at times frightening. Here, he's playing a much shallower and multidimensional character, a shlocky law student who gets engaged to alyson hannigan in the first episode.

Niether show is particularly good, but the new season of Veronica Mars starts next week, and that has another ex-Buffy cast member, and Steve Guttenberg too, so it should be pretty interesting.

"That was nifty"

Just finished rewatching Buffy The Vampire Slayer's 7th, and final, season. Season 7 gets disparaged a lot by internet-happy buffy fans with too much time on their hands (check out imdb if you doubt me,) but I think it's actually one of the strongest arcs. Well, hell, all the seasons are great. But season 7 is powerful for far more reasons than the fact that there is a Kim Deal/Breeders cameo, which should be good enough for anyone. (Kim Deal, people. Kim Dee-uhl. (How does one represent a schwa on an alphanumeric laptop keyboard?)) I love season 7 because it's about organizing. It's about collectivity and taking on powerful, sometimes intangible but ultimately very palpable networks of oppression and violence and relying on each other and sacrificing and putting your self and your body on the line and winning. It makes me cry. And the ending is like Lord of The Rings but instead of militarism, there's militance (and militants) and it's about democracy (demoncracy?) and growing up and getting hurt and moving on.

I think the pandacam is down.

Season 4 also gets a lot of shit. (Except for Hush, Joss Wedon's meditation on the failures and terrors of speech, which pretty much everyone including me admits is absolutely brilliant, and Restless, the collective dream episode which is way better than the earlier stab at the same idea from the first or second season with the chocolate bars and the clown etc.) I think season 4's important too, with its soulsucking freshman roomates and cavemen drunk college kids and military industrial university complexes and with its queering of half the show's tropes and its attempts, however deeply flawed, to show people having sex and not turning evil because of it. I also think that Season 3 may have been the strongest single arc in the entire show, ending the high school years with a bang, foreshadowing many of the themes and stories the show would tackle over the next four years, and also having some powerful things to say about youth organizing and high school and the state and Season 4 had to be anticlimactic because of this. It also took a little while for folks to get used to Cordelia's outsourcing to Angel and replacement with Anya, which ultimately worked rather brilliantly.

BBC World Today just had a pretty good piece on the CBGBs rent stuff which talked about the gentrification of downtown. They called it "market-led," which isn't entirely accurate, or rather obscures the ways in which the "market" relied on police tanks and neoliberal structural adjustments and the Giulianist attacks on communities of color, queer and transgender youth of color, homeless folks, street vendors, and nonviolent drug offenders. Nice to hear the clip of Debbie Harry singing an acoustic version of "Call Me" at one of the CB's benefits, though. If Hilly Kristal moves to Vegas, he shoudn't bother ever sitting foot in NYC again. No offense to Vegas or the folks who work there or Saqib. But there's no way that would not be disgusting. Tramps, Coney Island High, The Wetlands, The Spiral... The list of places i used to hang out and watch music (including, in the case of CBGB, my friends' bands and my brother's bands) which were early casualties of gentrification and Giuliani is a pretty long and frustratingly complete (except for Knitting Factory and Irving Plaza.) And yet Roseland, of course, is infuriatingly still terrorizing concertgoers with its awful acoustics, high door prices, and murderously high prices for teenyweeny bottles of water.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Gitmo

[this entry has been edited. I added some more at the end and changed around a sentence or two.]

2003's Harry Potter and The Order of The Phoenix followed in the wake of the very dark turn at the conclusion of 2000's Goblet of Fire, but, released just a few months after the invasion of Iraq, seemed pregnant with meanings not present int the first four books. As the threat of terror loomed, the ministry of magic, attempting to stamp out criticism and dissent, installs a fascist dictator at the head of Hogwarts, whose rather brutal discipline inadvertently incites Harry and friends to surreptitiously organize a clandestine revolutionary organization, much like that which his older friends have created outside the school's walls to battle the "Death Eaters," bent on preserving and returning to the school's (and the nation's) idealized halcyon days. Ultimately, the state's attempts to suppress the threat posed by Voldemort and his Death Eaters collapses when the villains invade the Ministry itself in an attempt to procure the prophecy which says Harry and Voldemort have to fight eachother to the death. People die, shit gets crazy, state hegemony gets disrupted, nothing will ever be the same again. Etc.

In Half Blood Prince, the terrorist threat looms large over Britain. Explosions, assassinations, and torture are commonplace, and the Ministry of Magic, powerless to halt the reign of terror, instead arrests and imprisons innocents in ghastly centers of detainment and madness simply to produce the reassuring illusions of stability and progress. The new Minister of Magic wants Harry to be his "mascot," a silent, pliant Morale booster. Granted, in a David Horowitzian turn (or perhaps a Jon Butlerian one), teachers within the wizarding world's institution of social reproduction/higher education are frequently duplicitous and occasionally flat-out treacherous in their alliances with the forces of evil and use of forbidden magic. And Rowling's is clearly an overly sympathetic account of "the good guys," even as Harry spurns the ministry for their despotic tactics and seems to be gravitating towards Buffy-style "anarchism"

The figures of the tortured, and the unjustly imprisoned, as well as the spy and the double agent have been central to previous books in the series but have assumed a new centrality in Order and Half-Blood Prince, infused, perhaps, with the urgency and horror of the current predicament of articulating a (neo)liberal British nationalist fantasy in the era of "7/7," G8, infinite detention, and the spectre of Abu Ghraib. Yet theirs is a centrality of the marginal -- a palpable absence, but an inability to speak. There is no resolution here, either for the metaphor for Operation Whatever The Fuck It Is These Days or for the book itself, just a lot of death, and fear of what's to come.