I promised/threatened Josh that I would post a response to his positivist graphic modeling/theorization of tv quality as soon as grades were in.  They're in, as is the first chapter of my dissertation, tentatively titled "Revolting Against Their Government?: Labor Insurgencies and Compromise in the Academic Defense Factory" and two fellowship applications.  I'm sitting in the library on a Tuesday afternoon procrastinating from prepping for my first recitation (the stupid NYU term for what the rest of the world calls discussion sections), so i suppose I might as well impugn my friends' television habits.

I kid, of course.

But I was thinking about Josh's graph the other day, (in the shower, oddly enough,) and about why it doesn't work for me, or better to say doesn't really describe how i would evaluate my own affective investments in the tv I watch.  This has nothing to do with the fact that Josh seems to think Six Feet Under's increasingly cliched SUPER PROFOUND ALAN BALL CANNED LIBERAL CRITIQUE OF BOURGEOIS SUBURBAN FAMILIES CUM GAY BUT NOT QUEER HOMONORMATIVE OVERDETERMINED NARRATIVE OF THE CLOSET (tm) makes for better TV than, say The Wire.  (It most certainly does not, though 6FU had its moments - the kidnapping episode especially is perhaps the most disturbing hour of television which does not feature a cast member of Jersey Shore, and the wire could sometimes mythologize the tropes of policing it sought to problematize and/or fall into the trap of celebrating its Omars and Brothers Mouzone - as in that stupid high noon showdown sequence in season three - as cheap mythic icons, a mythologization which contributed little to the show's polemical interventions and narrative power.)  I will say that Six Feet Under is certainly better than say, American Beautyˆ, and that I actually have grown somewhat fond of True Blood even though it too strikes me as really problematic on several levels, maybe most notably how the Tara character has been written over the last two seasons.

Nor does my rejection of Josh's schema have anything in particular to do with my general aversion to Law and Order and more or less every police procedural on the planet on the grounds that their optics are the racialized optics of, if not the state, than a reactionary law and order (the discourse, not the tv show which was headquartered in Roland Betts' chelsea piers complex) sentiment which invests in the state and/or in fascist vigilantism the sole hope of reclaiming the city from a diffuse, shadowy criminal menace.  Also, while The West Wing under Sorkin is addictive television, I tend to find it addictive in the same way people find war and racism addictive, and the west wing has plenty of glorification of both, along with the blase sexism Aaron Sorkin is famous for and which he put to such blatant use in The Social Network's ridiculous bathroom stall blowjobs and histrionic bed-burnings by irrational SOCIAL CLIMBING ASIAN IVY LEAGUE STUDENTS(tm) who, like every female character Sorkin has ever written except for the ones who bomb stuff or order stuff bombed (Demi Moore's character in A Few Good Men notwithstanding) are even more neurotic and weak than his stock nebbishy drugged pretentious ass male protagonists.  (I don't want to suggest that i see a bed-burning episode as necessarily a negative thing.  I'm sure someone could make the argument that that kind of performative excess marks the irruption into the film's narrative of subjectivities which Sorkin is almost always deaf to unless using for his own shallow liberal ventriloquisms, but the problem for me is that Sorkin and Fincher are clearly including this scene as evidence of pathology, of how beyond rationality Andrew Garfield's character's life has become, and his girlfriend is treated as nothing so much as a prop of craziness.  This may be an uncanny depiction of the orientalism of the hollywood lens and/or the facebook imaginary, but it's also itself implicated in such a gaze.)

Ok, ok, The West Wing was a good show, at least until season 5, which is awful, and if you can get past its self-righteously liberal triangulatory potshots at the kind of politics I subscribe to - the episode where Toby visits the IMF protesters is Sorkinian megadouchery at its finest.  But I'm not being fair to Josh, who deserves better than me saying my bone to pick with his graph isn't his tastes and then going on to bash the TV he likes for like 500 words in the longest praeteritio since I don't even know.  Josh, by the way, is a pretty amazing person who does really amazing work, so when I tease him for not having sufficiently refudiated the finale of Battlestar Galactica, I kid.  Though seriously, that was some awful writing.

No, the problem for me is really the criteria, the effort vs reward schema.  I like TV that makes me think really, really hard, that makes me work, makes me rewatch episodes.  That's why I liked Lost, especially the 4th and 5th seasons, despite their cliches and stupidity, more than 6fu, which i felt trafficked in a lot of the same, but more pretentiously and without time travel or smoke monsters or polar bears.  But the shows I love that aren't Lost or The Wire or Deadwood are things like Freaks and Geeks and Buffy Season 3, and the reason I like them isn't because they require little effort, it's because they evoke things that I care about or that resonate with me, whether that's the cultural politics of air travel in the age of the patriot act, the denouement of the urban crisis, the coloniality of the west, or the condition of geekitude, the collective fantastic escapist world-making of dungeons and dragons, high school as hell, or hand-eating loose seals.  So really I think what I am arguing for is for other ways of evaluating cultural production which escape the rubrics of labor invested or guilt indulged and instead point us towards the alternative and sometimes dangerous knowledges we locate in the culture we produce and enjoy.  Or, in other words "we have to take the boxer-brief approach."  (JRE, quote page, 2003.)

Some thoughts on a shitstorm

I don't have much to say about the Aliza Shvarts mess other than that Yale should not be censoring artists who are doing innovative, politically complex and well-thought out work.

I'm particularly interested though, in a little-explored (at least in commentary I've read) aspect of the administrative fallout, which is the academic labor politics of the Dean's response.

From Peter Salovey's most recent statement:

After investigation, Dean Storr and I have determined that there were serious errors of judgment on the part of two individuals. In one case, the instructor responsible for the senior project should not have allowed it to go forward. In the other, an adviser [sic] should have interceded and consulted others when first given information about the project. Appropriate action has been taken in these two cases.

Both the instructor and the advisor are almost certainly adjuncts or otherwise contingent. (As a lecturer, the advisor is the former, albeit a highly credentialed one.) What is "appropriate action" here? How this act of censorship affect the employment status of these teachers? Without job security, academic freedom is a fiction.

Every Day and Night/I'm Out of Fucking Time

Le Tigre reference in the title. Ok.

I usually do a year end post at the end of every year. Here, here, here, here/here, if you're interested, in chronological order from 2003 to 2006. And there's a bonus one here. And see my attempt at narrating how i learned to stop worrying and organize. And qualification on said attempt.

This year I'm somewhat tempted to just throw a link here - one of my favorite posts from the last year, and indeed the last four, and a post which i think suggests what animates this blog at its best - a dedication to a global politics of intellectual labor and anticapitalism towards a collective reinvention of the city as a space of social justice and for the transformation of the university from neoliberal profit machine, difference engine, and labor exploiter to a liberated, just endeavor and project. That entry above emerged at a particularly nebulous point in my grad school career and in GSOC's continuing struggle. And i don't know how successful I've been in the intervening months in working towards the goals i lay out. This is no place to air dirty laundry of GSOC strategies, but suffice to say that we have our work cut out for us, and it will not be easy.

I fantasized about dropping out at regular intervals. Like yesterday, hanging out with Josh in Park Slope. I think about going back to Unite-HERE all the time, if they'd take me. My dad had open heart surgery in April. He's doing pretty good these days. I stared at a lot of computer screens. I became a 'preceptor' and went into massive credit card debt. Marna Borgstrom and Vin Petrini made Joe Zaccagnino proud. I passed an exam. The writers went on strike.


It's been a strange year. It picked up towards the end.

Two, Three, Many 425 College Streets

The organisation of university labour creates a new relation between dissenting academics and oppositional social movements. Negri and Lazzarato suggest that when universities were more marginal to capitalism, academics engage themselves with political movements from a position of apparent exteriority. Today, when university teachers find themselves unequivocally involved in capital's appropriation of ‘general intellect', possibilities emerge for academics to make more ‘transverse' connections. (21) Rather than descending from the heights to commit themselves to a cause largely external to their daily experience, academics become the carriers of particular skills, knowledges and accesses useful to movements - for example, those against the privatisation of public facilities, or in ‘living wage' campaigns supporting service workers on campus and in local communities - in which they participate on the basis of increasing commonalities with other members of post-Fordist ‘mass intellect'.
-Nick Dyer Witheford

"GESO's alliance with Locals 34 and 35 also signalled an important (albeit fragile and even transitory) ideological shift. If most graduate students at Yale saw themselves as budding members of the professional-managerial class, their fight for a union alongside clerical and service workers complicated that imagined class identity. In becoming part of the Federation of University Employees, graduate teachers redefined their status within the university: they would not be middle managers-in-training... Yale's very vision of the academy as a g(u)ilded realm wgerein graduate students apprentice under mentor-professors was itself brought into question." - Cynthia Young

"And if we were all capable of uniting to make our blows stronger and infallible and so increase the effectiveness of all kinds of support given to the struggling people — how great and close would that future be!" - Che Guevara

This is fairly amazing.

This blog turns an improbable and sometimes unbelievable three years old today, which is coincidentally the five year anniversary of the "Building an Equal Partnership" march and rally at the medical school. The ironies and continuities of organizing work on an academic calendar rarely cease.

I spent this august anniversary in New Haven, attending GESO's latest reworking of the Education In the Streets form developed by AJH and the UOC during the March 2003 strike, a Teach Out about/against/past casualization, which featured powerful contributions from Mike Palm, GESO members, a local 35 casual employee, Cary Nelson, Michael Denning, etc. It was the first action in New Haven i had been to since the 2005 strike. Turnout was excellent, but neither that, nor that it was awesome to see EF, EJ, NDB, ML, HH, GA, PR, etc., seems particularly important.

What is important is College Street, that site where imperial Yale borders what Wilhelm in 1971 noted was the force which had demonstrated to New Haven that said behemoth could be beaten, was vulnerable. (“Union Upsets Yale, 35-0,” Modern Times, 7/1/71.) If, as David Lee was so often quoted as claiming during the 2002 campaign for an alumni fellow seat on the Yale Corporation, the university administration had "met its Waterloo" in the Federation of Hospital and University Employees, then College Street is (only the most visible) battlefield of that struggle, a site enveloped by Yale's tendrils of capital, of gentrification, of biopower, but never subsumed into it, always threatening to destabilize yes, but also to transform, to augment, to radically reshape and reconstitute.

This is because of 425 college street, because of the movement that flourishes there, among clerical and technical workers, service and maintenance workers, graduate employees and hill residents, community organizers and undergraduates, hospital workers and (a proud few) faculty. This movement has grown amidst and despite 14 strikes in 66 years, fierce repression from the disciplinary apparatus of the university (just ask Young) and endless hours of meetings, visits, organizing conversations, and to delve further into questions of tactics would not be appropriate on a public weblog.

Suffice to say that I mention all of this not for the sake of some nostalgia for snow-strewn picket signs, "free the llamas," the nation drill squad, or Josh Eidelson's runaway metaphors involving houses and justice and other brilliant gesticulations, but rather because there is a very real sense in which this is what we need to create at NYU and elsewhere. This is the movement - or the outlines of the movement, at any rate, that we need to spread like a virus of justice and democracy across the university's fascist bodily metaphors, reversing and denaturing Sextonian slurs and Levinian stammerings. It is not that this model must be exported fully and without change. I am not even calling for "repetition with difference" but rather for a deep critical and political engagement with the kinds of organizing and tactics that have emerged in New Haven over these past seven decades. This is a call to work within that tradition, to build movements like those we glimpsed in the snow on March 6th and in the sun today, clogging the arteries of New Haven's power elite on September 13th and lighting candles on October 5th, in backyard meetings throughout the summer of 2003 and in 55 Whitney on August 26th, in the Financial Aid Office in February '05, blockading the power plants in '71, and screaming "BEEP BEEP YALE'S CHEAP" in '84.

Let's get to work.

we grew up in spite of it

I have Against Me!'s "Baby I'm an Anarchist" stuck in my head today, a song which I have always kind of loathed for what seems to me a fetishization of radicalism qua radicalism, a shallow and privileged investment in a transparent and extraordinarily limited genealogy of struggle which stops when and where more complex relationships to work and capital and the state become evident and necessary. And no, I'm not saying I'm not an anarchist (though I have many frustrations only in part encapsulated by Andy Cornell's trenchant intervention in his letter in Letters From Young Activists) nor am I talking here about a capitulation to the kind of liberal pathologies Phil Ochs and Josh Eidelson expertly demarcate.

And then there's the HOD...

I listened to Giant Steps tonight for the first time since god knows when. If I were Alek I would tell you that "Syeeda's Song Flute" and "Mr. P.C." are both underrated, but I am not. (And nothing on that album is particularly overrated, although when "Naima" is getting namedropped by Talib Kweli (albeit a decade ago and under somewhat erroneous pretenses (if he loved Naima so much, what do we do about Alice? Or maybe that makes Kweli's simile somewhat more profound than it would otherwise seem), maybe it's more, um, overdetermined. I think I swore to myself I'd never use that phrase on this blog, which hasn't been much of anything lately due to other commitments and/or boredom and/or a lack of interest in or ability to organizing my thoughts and frustrations for pixellation. I like Giant Steps so much more than My Favorite Things. My Favorite Things revolves around the soprano sax, does not involve Paul Chambers, and includes two standards. However revolutionary the melodic phrasings Coltrane et al employ here, I've always found Giant Steps more exciting and rewarding. Maybe that makes me a philistine. I am ok with that.

Ok, Hora Decubitus. Speaking of which I was walking up 5th ave in sunset park today whistling "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat" and thinking about the time i missed my cue on "work song" in a concert in 10th grade. And wikipedia says Paul Chambers died of Tuberculosis not heroin, which means someone lied to me in high school.

Fell asleep reading. Had a strange dream involving Grove Street in New Haven, a non-existent bus station, Josh, one of my high school ethics teachers, and Dee-Lite of "Groove is in the House" fame.

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.

People In The Pumpkin

The one word to describe Josh was ¨gesticulation.¨ (Alek was ¨marriage¨. Ted Haggard was ¨gay.¨ Homi Bhabha was ¨postcolonial.¨ Helena was ¨Jessup.¨) Gloria and Marissa are amazing at round three. I still dominate round 1 and suck at everything else. Firm and Toned is a descriptor ¨apllied to someone who works out a lot.¨ (The one word descriptor was JDate, and Phoebe had an amazing pantomime for this in round 3...)

"Don't Stop Believin'"

The following represents the latest in a long series of attempts at rewriting popular music songs to be about academic labor struggles, a series which began way back in 2003 with "Knockin' on Levin's Door." I mean here not to ridicule or diminish the seriousness of what is at stake in our fight, to which i am deeply committed, but rather to add some levity and suggest one potential, if not particularly useful, form cultural production influenced by the strike might take. This particular attempt is inspired by an inexplicable recent fascination with Steve Perry and a desire to create something which, unlike, say, RUN-UOC, can be sung on picket lines. Also deserving of credit is The Revolutionary Army of California, whose inspired cover of the song on which the following is based turned my attentions away from "Separate Ways (Worlds Apart)" for long enough to write this.


"Don't Stop Believin'"
S. Perry/N. Schon/J. Cain/This Blogger

Banner we'll unfurl,
in this neoliberal world
your threats and intimidation, well we ain't scared.

Fill the city with noise,
our international's in Detroit
We picket decked out in union flair

long meetings in the conference room
more productive than we'd assume
we are united in this fight
It goes on and on and on and on

Strikers chanting,
up and down the picket line
John Sexton cringes at the sight
Striking teachers
fighting for a resolution
fighting, striving for what's right

Their PR flacks are pretty shrill,
and so we struggle still
Follow mother jones' advice,
yeah -- we organize!

Gotta win, can't afford to lose
assure you this ain't no ruse
Yeah the struggle never ends
it goes on and on and on and on

Strikers chanting,
up and down the picket line
John Sexton cringes at the sight
Striking teachers
fighting for a resolution
fighting, striving for what's right

Don't stop Believing
Send john sexton reeling
Striking teachers


[shout outs to Alyssa and to Josh, whose version of "Time after time" was so good that i still think the line "Flashback '84" is in the original.]

breaking

Both the Boston Globe and the New Haven Independent are reporting that a deal has been struck between Yale-New Haven Hospital, 1199NEHCEU, and CORD. More later, obviously.

Update:
News Channel 8
New Haven Independent

The deal includes landmark promises from the hospital to the community,
including a promise to hire 100 New Haveners a year, many from the surrounding
Hill, Dwight and West River neighborhoods; to establish a “citizen’s advisory
committee” to monitor Yale-New Haven’s free care policies; to invest at least
$100,000 a year for five years in a “career ladder program” for local people;
make a voluntary tax payment to the city the way other major not-for-profits
have agreed to do; make 12 traffic-signal improvements in the area around the
cancer center; and contribute $100,000 a year for five years to the Mayor’s
Youth Initiative.

In other words, the hospital agreed to a “community
benefits agreement” that activists from the labor-affiliated community group
CORD had been demanding.

“Yale-New Haven sat down with a community group they don’t control and they struck a deal,” crowed Rev. Henry Morris (pictured) of CORD. “That’s never happened before.” He predicted the community benefits deal would set a precedent for all major future development in the city

Update 2:
Josh