so i moved from the hotel room to an "efficiency apartment" in a gentrified 'hood ful of good looking young wealthy white professionals and students. Pros: better food options, i'm stealing wireless, and i won't have to move again for a couple months, hopefully. Cons: no stove, so no pasta - unless i can boil water with my hot plate they have provided for me - but i'd need a pot for that first. No toilet paper or soap or shampoo yet is problematic as well, but i can remedy these things very easily, whereas the stove thing has me a bit more miffed. Enh, i'll live. And getting six new keys in like a three hour period makes me feel all mature and shit.

Well, i managed to find my way from my hotel to the union office, which is emboldening.



UPDATE: I'm lonely and stressed out already. And i'm hungry too.

well, i made it to the new burg, thanks to a ride from my parents who rock. I was supposed to be staying in like an "extended stay" kind of place, but none of them were anywhere near mass transportation or even the city itself, so instead i'm at a hampton inn which is way too bourgie for me but has wireless, which is kind of cool. HBO in the rooms, a bed bigger than some of the rooms i've lived in over the course of the last four years. Luckily, i'm probably moving to more modest dwellings at the end of the week, but the fact that this is all being paid for by workers' dues money makes the whole thing somewhat stressful and uncomfortable. I'm about to head out and figure out how to get to and from the local union office.

Music, briefly

This Week is fantastic. Jean Grae's skillful rhymes are worthy of all the praise she's been getting recently and more. I like Antics a lot and i don't buy any of the shit some reviewers have been saying about it - particularly the tiny blurb in the Times last week. It's a great album and Interpol is a very, very good band. I'm currently wrestling with The Beautiful Struggle. Train of Thought took me a few weeks to really appreciate, and while I recognized the ..., er..., quality of Kweli's solo follow-up within the first two listens, i have to admit that at first i skipped to Joy and was just pissed because the only line Mos Def has on the album is "Kweli i know how you feel." In retrospect, this made sense. Quality was Kweli's album, not black star's, and not even reflection eternal's, and it was a pretty incredible one. So i'm not going to post my reaction to the record yet, mostly because they're pretty muddled at this point, though "The Ghetto Show" and "Black Girl Pain" are both great, and instead try to listen a few more times and get a better sense of the album. It's been a pretty busy week in the realm of CD releases, and i need to check out some of the other stuff that's come out recently, but i have to say i'm psyched about the new Le Tigre and Mos Def releases the week after next.

people are talking about Fox News's "reporting"/clear falsification of post-debate Kerry quotes - screed like

"Women should like me! I do manicures."

"Didn't my nails and cuticles look great? What a good debate!"

"I'm metrosexual — [Bush's] a cowboy."

It's clearly fucked up that Fox is fabricating slander. But what i'm more perturbed by is that none of the people who are blasting this, including people whose opinions i respect and value enormously, are attempting to wrestle with what seems to be the most obvious element of Cameron's bizarre attempt at a fascist appropriation of The Onion (or something) is the stark homophobic logic which permeates/saturates the "jest." The not particularly tacit implication here is that while Bush is a proletarian he-man, a staid defender of revolutionary freedom and Western reason, (despite his Connecticut upbringing, incredibly wealth and powerful roots, and tenure at Groton, Yale, and Harvard,) Kerry is effete and effeminate, "metro" only because another prefix would be far too obvious a smear. Yet that to queer Kerry is to slander him is the real argument Cameron makes, the one he assumes is obvious enough not to even warrant consideration.



Bush isn't a cowboy, he's a preppie fratboy cheerleader turned yuppie fuck-up with a hard on for fascism and empire. Kerry isn't a metrosexual, he's a jackass. (And i've never found "the metrosexual" to be a particularly useful construction.) The ways in which Cameron constructs gender, sexuality, and their relationship to state power may not be novel, (though there's certainly an argument to be made about new imperial articulations of masculinity and heterosexuality in the age of San Francisco, New Paltz, and Samara,) but they warrant more than oblique references from folks struggling to bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old.



I'm moving to Boston tomorrow to start the new job after almost a week of grueling training. I'm stressed out and not totally sure if i can do this, so wish me luck.

fulfilling a long-overdue promise thanks to the magic of packing my life into boxes yet again:

"if you steal my seat, I might flash people, but maybe that's the place UOC needs to get."
-Ana , September, 2003

About 10,000 hotel and casino workers in Atlantic City, NJ walked off the job yesterday. In San Francisco, which is where i've been for the last week, the 1400 who struck four hotels wednesday have been joined by another 2600 who've been locked out by the hotel association. Very soo, another 8,000or so hotel workers could join them in Los Angeles and D.C. Luckily, UNITE HERE has a visionary and solid strategy to win these fights as well as the ones looming on the horizon in 2006 and organize the entire industry, which has spent the last three years employing fictitious claims of hardship and austerity in an attempt to legitimate a massive speed-up and attempting to render workers' voices silent through massive consolidation. For more on the hotel strike/lockout, see Hotel Workers United.