Please explain

Alanis Morissette pretends to be Tori Amos covering "My Humps." Fine. Ha. But the video, a hipster satire of what Alanis Morissette's video director apparently thinks is a typical hip hop video/possibly a bit of self mockery (alanis looking tortured and being smothered in falling pillow down) strikes me as just sort of disturbing, both politically and aesthetically. We have reached a point where white hipsters dancing around to instrumental mimcry of bad hip hop is neither funny or ironic, in either the actual definition of irony or the Alanis Morissette definition of irony, which is like ten thousand spoons when all you need is a fork or some shit like that. In case I have left any doubt, the black eyed peas vie with the killers for the worst band ever apellation. They make Jefferson Starship look like a band with integrity. We built this shitty.

I bought a bunch of CDs yesterday, and I haven't had the chance to listen to all of them yet, but my favorite so far is the Numero Group's latest installment in their fantastic "Eccentric Soul" series, the compilation Twinight's Lunar Rotation, which delves deep into the catalogue of said Chicago soul label in the late 1960s and early 1970s. I also watched the first few episodes of season 3 of the wire, which is this far not as powerful or nuanced as the first two seasons. I saw Grindhouse last night. It's ridiculous, easily the best film Rodriguez has ever made, and less annoying than Kill Bill. I am not sure whether I really like it - i have many problems with Tarantino and Rodriguez both, but it's certainly an interesting way to spend three and a half hours.

It's twenty minutes before four a.m., and I'm headed towards my bed (about eighteen inches from where I'm currently sitting.) I should have gone to sleep hours ago, but after I got home from visiting the parents and the little brother, I was unable to refrain from watching the final two episodes of the first season of the wire, about which I have conflicting feelings. It's well written, it deals with the social production of criminality in a far more complex manner thany any cop show I've ever seen, and at times goes to great legnths to make it clear that the cops are not necessarily the good guys or result to simple pathologies about drug culture and ghetto criminality and the genre's well-worn (racist) tropes of psychotic or menacing black villainy. But at times it slips up, too caught up in the righteousness or moral failings of its own dramatis personae, or the seductive aesthetics of blood splatters and bullet wounds on naked sixteen-year old flesh. I hear later seasons are better. Maybe someday I'll have time to watch them.

My goals for the coming year, in case you were wondering, are to figure out how to be an academic in a way that won't make me sick to my stomach, and how to get work done and produce academic work i'm not ashamed of and within a reasonable time period. I want to help build a new future for academic workers at NYU and everywhere else. I want to make our struggle part of larger struggles for social justice in ways that aren't meaningless ISO bullet points or shallow Social Democrat platitudes. I want to level a blood elf mage to 70. I want to figure out how to be in a relationship for longer than two weeks again (If the preceeding sentence did not foreclose any such possibility from the get-go), which, I supsect, will involve me learning to trust myself and other people to a far greater degree than I did last year
. I want to read good books and write good papers and finish my first exam. I want to get a phone call from Phoebe informing me that YNHH workers have won recognition via a card check, but that's out of my hands at the moment. But mostly I want to work through all the shit that was so difficult this past year and figure out how to move forward. Getting my registration out of library-mandated arrears will be a good first step. Finishing the incompletes is similarly something I should have done a long time ago but keep getting stalled by fear and frustration. And thoughts about the union deserve more than to be shunted off to the end of this logorrheaic psychobabble, but I hope that this blog will return to foregrounding those issues rather than crappy music blogging, the aimless diary-style of a twelve year old mind trapped in a twenty-five year old's hairy-backed frame, or half formed and sometimes ill-informed angsty rants about shit I probably shouldn't be writing about. Bedtime.