Apologies for slim posting lately. It looks like instead og going to Tucson for the weekend, i'll be there for a week - and then instead of flying back up to NY, i'm driving with Julie in her mustang. Well, ok, i'm not driving, she is. But it's going to rock. I'll have my cell phone, so if you need, just call me. You don't have to worry, Wait. Wasn't that a song?



My only regret is that my new cousin, Etta - Andrea's third child(!) will be born probably tomorrow, and i'm probably not going to see her before i get back. But i do need to get out of NY. And this will be really fun. And i may get to meet Juan. (hehe.) All in all, i'm psyched.

Weirdest dream yet last night. Yuppies turn into insane murderous dinosaur aliens and me, Julie, Lauren, and a bunch of other UOC people have to defeat them or something. And my 87 year old grandmother was somehow involved (on our side, i think.) It was really scary. I read too many comic books when i was a kid.



I've been here for over two months now, and i'm kind of fed up.

Miscellany

I don't think i ever realized exactly just how freaking long Disintegration is. I took it on one of my four-mile walks today, pressed play in the elevator of my aprents building, and didn't hit the end of "Untitled" (one of the best album closers ever - ack i sound like a character in High Fidelity) until i was crossing 79th street on the way home, around 80 minutes later. And it's a great album, to boot.



I'm on my second spin of the day of DJ Shadow's Endtroducing, which i wasn't hip enough to be listening to back in '94, but which is really amazing and i feel like i could just leave it in my CD player for a couple years and never get tired of it.



Someone found this site by googling "Shamus McNasty", which is funny a) because Shamus McNasty haven't been a band for like four years despite the relative activity of all four members and i don't know why someone would google them - though i certainly think they were a great band, and b)because i rarely get search hits to this site, and i only mentioned Shamus McNasty like yesterday and already i get a search hit and it's for a band who haven't played a gig together in four years. But i can't really think of a band whose first gig i would rather have been a fake roadie for. Well, except for, like, the Replacements. Or the Pixies. Or the Clash. Ok, shut up.



I have a carcinogenic and ulcer-causing bacteria in my stomach for which i have to start taking antibiotic cocktails tomorrow. This continues for a week, and then in three months i go back to the GI doctor and take a "breath test" (sounds like being busted for DUI or something) to see if the damn things are dead or not. And on top of that, my fingernail is infected and very pustual. I'm sure you all wanted to know that. Oops, too late.

While googling friends in a fit of boredom i stumbled upon a memento of the most painful and exasperating experience organizing undergraduates - (other than the time Julie didn't show up at the Peabody action with the Llamas, which for some reason inspired me to have a temper tantrum. Thank god Abbey and Katie were there to talk me down.) I am speaking of the April 7, 2002 Six hour long YCC vote on whether or not to pass Matt Robinson's resolution condemning Card Check Neutrality and advising the university to never enter into a crad check agreement with anyone. Over the course of the night, we heard Robinson boast that he knew more about card check than anyone else in the room (which, in addition to a whole platoon of SLAC and USAY folks, also included Lis Pimentel, David Sanders, Anita Seth (listed in the minutes as Anita Singh, for some reason,) Michael Denning (listed as "Matt Denning." They didn't get Butler or Gaddis's names wrong... They also quote a "Katie Klein," but that's just me nitpicking) and Local 34 veteran Steve Fortes.) We also heard the editor in chief of the YDN, who is now a speechwriter for the Bush administration, vocally bash the union and urge representatives to vote for Robinson's resolution in a manner many found reprehensible. I had forgotten the sheer arrogance at play that evening. Reading the minutes reminds me of that, but also of how so many of us were willing to sit through all the bullshit and keep the pressure on to make sure that justice was served. While i still think of the whole night as a pretty disgusting moment in my life, i also think that folks like Jacob and Abby L., who argued that defeating the Robinson resolution and including a clause in the final resolution passed which urged the university to sit down with GESO was a huge victory, were right.



Anyway, if you want to revisit this sorry chapter in the history of undergraduate complicity in administrative attempts at union busting, you can do so here

Holy Crap

The B-Team, known by UOCistas erstwhile and current as "The GESO band" has a web page. They definitely get a link.

Nicotine Bubblegum is great. There's the usual Beatles influence that pervades about half the songs Sam writes (the others tend to lean towards Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde, veering often into the nether regions of Surfer Rosa's chaotic bursts of sarcastic fury and Doolittle's epic pop perfection,) but" Drivin' On Hawaii," a Grossman/Beins/Dydo composition which is arguably my favorite song on the CD, unapologetically owes a great debt to the Velvet Underground and sounds absolutely fantastic.

Skip Gates jumps on the Cosby bandwagon, tacitly endorsing the erstwhile Dr. Huxtable's pathologization of black youth and urban black working class subcultures. I'm fine with Gates' assertion that the construction of race in America necessitates that African-Americans be in some sense bilingual, and I don't necessarily disagree with the statement that there is anti-intellectualism among poor and working class black youth, although in the many years i have spent working with high school and middle school students in both New York and New Haven, i haven't seen all that much anti-intellectualism, if any, and what may have been present certainly had nothing to do with parents' decisions to name their kids "Shaquana" or "Ali", as Cosby slanderously alleged in a capitulation to the anglo-saxon supremacist cultural perogatives of people like Samuel Huntington and Pat Buchanan. It's certainly true, as Gates argues, that "we" need to treat black people, for the purposes of this debate, as individual actors individually negotiating the structural violence of race, class, gender, sexuality, and militarism. What irks me about Gates' op-ed is that he doesn't do this, instead, as with much of what Gates writes, the paternalism which pervades his narrative and with which he endows himself with an unquestionable textual omniscience and omnipotence, treating the objects of his scrutiny very much like "helpless rag dolls" in his own "supreme act of condescension."