Congratulations, Bono Vox, you're the guy Jesse Helms trots out to put a kindler, genler face on his continued intransigence in the face of the forty year-old victories of social movements which pretty much define "historical bloc." You must be so proud.

Sarcasm aside, this is a pretty why Bono's self-righteous, grandiose Jimmy Carter impression disgusts me. The best possible outcome is a kinder, gentler Empire. What more frequently happens is that it gives an open racist like Helms or a parafascist like Bush a hip (at least to forty year old white people) lawn ornament they can use to look "moderate."

Gee, NYT, god forbid you could actually write about the literatures written by and for working class readers over the past hundred and fifty years in your deeply flawed and otherwise ridiculous piece on class and fiction. Read some Michael Denning, for christ sakes.

And by the way, this:

On television and in the movies now, and even in the pages of novels, people tend to dwell in a classless, homogenized American Never-Never Land. This place is an upgrade, but not a drastic one, from the old neighborhood where Beaver, Ozzie and Harriet, and Donna Reed used to live; it's those yuppified city blocks where the friends on "Friends" and the "Seinfeld" gang had their apartments, or in the now more fashionable version, it's part of the same exurb as One Tree Hill and Wisteria Lane - those airbrushed suburbs where all the cool young people hang out and where the pecking order of sex and looks has replaced the old hierarchy of jobs and money.

isn't classless and homogenized, it just happens to be your class represented as normative and universal. But don't mistake Seinfeld, famous for its Othering representations of ethnicized and racialized subalterned populations as cheap background jokes to the solipsistic faux-upper west side of Larry David's yuppie protagonists' ennui humor, for "classless."

NYC YuppieCult Blog Gothamist shills for the sweatshop magnates. And they disable comments on the post, so readers can't pipe in. It's a shame too, because i wanted to post something snarky about how if Nike lets you design your own shoe, the logical next step could be an opportunity to slum it in the maquiladoras (or whatever they call 'em in Guangzhou and South Korea) and actually make the shoe. Not very incisive, i know, but now i'm more frustrated with the blog itself, for being the "promotional partner" of one of the more evil corporations on the planet and so brazenly abandoning any pretense of "objective" (which never really exists anyway, granted) journalism in the process of kissing Phillip Knight's air-jordaned, made by a Honduran 12-year old, feet. This kind of bloggertisement is pretty reprehensible.

And yes, Pedro Martinez was awesome last night.

The search for an affordable apartment in Brooklyn has begun. Looking with another Yale kid in the Sunset Park/outskirts of Park Slope/Clinton Hill areas at the moment. If anyone has better ideas, lemme know.

New season of six feet under premieres tonight. Times review this morning was good - well, i mean, like, well, written and probably accurate. Critical, not gushy, generally on point. I hope George dies soon. (Well, not really, cause then they'd probably turn Ruth into a gibbering mess. So i hope she dumps his ass soon.) And that they stop the morality play bullshit with claire (first gabriel demas, then billy, then her friend cheating on the SATs, then gabriel demas again, then the abortion, then the whole freaking ou about Mena Suvari's character's sexuality, then "plagiarism," then cocaine, then billy again. Please.)

Saturday's the 5 year high school reunion, to which i've ultimately decided to go. It should be fun and hopefully not too awkward. Then Tuesday is the pixies. And then the thursday of the following week is sleater-kinney, so June should be pretty tolerable.

There are some ways in which being in graduate school at NYU might be less frustrating than being a graduate student at Yale. (I'm talking about the newspaper, not the obstructionist tactics of the administration. We'll see if they are finally going to let a strike happen rather than deal with the union come August.)

But then there's the stuff that might be equally fucked up. I've never dealt with anything like a dean veto of a unanimously approved job search candidate before. In some ways it's worse for the department even than what Yale did to Connie Allen, because it's essentially a big "fuck you" to not only the students and the professor involved, but also the search committee and the entire department, and in this case, the entire Institute for Social and Cultural Analysis (or whatever it winds up being called,) which is the big umbrella department into which all of the cultural studies programs at the university just merged into last week. [Redacted], welcome back to the imperial university.

While I continue to enjoy doing research in the middle of a museum exhibit, I am sometimes inclined to post a sign next to my computer which would read something to the effect of “Not Part of the Exhibit.” That only one museumgoer has actually asked about my work after having stared at me perplexedly compounds the minor and wholly unjustified annoyance on my part. I figured out who the famous professor who every day gets accosted by graduate students who tell her they “love her book” or somesuch is. You can bet I’m very satisfied with myself.

The other apparent tradeoff is that, with one or two exceptions, my fellow researchers seem inclined to compensate for whatever dynamic engagement between librarygoer and library community the Schomburg fosters by having very little to say to each other. This is disappointing, because I am sure that many of the three to ten other researchers in here on any given day (sometimes I’m the only researcher here, which is a little odd) are doing very interesting work, and I’m either nosy or enough interested in other people’s lives and work that I’d like to know what they are doing and who they are. Also, maybe they know things that I don’t or HC doesn’t about the research I’m doing, and could help me find sources or material I wouldn’t otherwise know about. Instead, I’ll continue to wade through a veritable mountain of manuscripts, drafts, letters, brochures, index cards, surveys, tables, articles, and fragments and hope I’m being productive.

I just got back from my mom’s 60th birthday (she looks like she’s 40 and acts like she’s twenty) Motown dance party, which was a lot of fun – friends of the family I hadn’t seen in many years (some not since leaving Philadelphia going on 16 years ago,) friends of the family I saw last month but don’t see enough, family, and my incredibly cool 88 year old former truck drivin’ dance teacher grandmother, with whom I danced, of course. I haven‘t seen my mom, who got to get on stage and sing with the Motown band my dad hired for three songs, be this happy and have this much fun in a long time, maybe ever, so that made me really happy by the transitive property of being happy. And i'm actually lloking forward to the rest of the family stuff that has me pretty solidly booked through sunday.

Pitchfork reviewer feels that Chapelle Show excerpt on new Common album disrupts authentic blackness of "palpable Southside surroundings." Film at 11.

But seriously dude, it's a major label hip hop album whose first single has already recieved massive amounts of airplay on MTV. Do you really think you can get away with pretending this is a Robert Johnson '45 and not looking at it in the context of capital flows and imperial racial imaginaries (Which your comments adhere to quite nicely?) If so, can I have your job?