Other weird things that happened in New Haven today:

1.The (very cute) little girl who freaked out over the (very cute and well-behaved) dog in Ashley's and started crying.
2.Doug Rae sitting at the table next to us.

Hello New Haven, Goodbye New Haven

Unemployment hasn't felt this relaxing in years. I'm now done with my job, the material from the Schomburg, the NYPL, and SML having been delivered to the professor for whom i have been working these last three months (which have on the whole been engaging and productive.) Seeing New Haven for what will probably be the last time for the next while (unless you guys go on strike again or something) was good, despite the hordes of Explovites bearing shopping bags. Glad i got the chance to see Phoebe and talk union for a while.

Now to find an apartment, figure out what the hell is going on with grad school and GSOC, and read as many books as i can between now and September.

NYC IMC reports back from the NYU administration's "town hall" meeting.

The dialogue was foreclosed when Sexton, accused of filibustering when he continually responded to each speaker with long-winded and convoluted defenses of the administration’s position, stated that the administration will no longer recognize graduate assistants and teaching assistants as workers and would therefore no longer recognize the union as the appropriate “voice mechanism” for students, thus hiding behind the National Labor Relations Board decision in 2004.

Even though the university may continue to recognize the union despite the NLRB ruling, Sexton said the university will continue to grant increases in stipends and to provide healthcare and other benefits to graduate students without the union. Many participants noted the irony of Sexton’s promises, pointing out that the union is the sole reason for increased benefits enjoyed since the inception of the first contract. Supporters added that graduate students seek not only benefits (or, in this case, a promise of benefits), but a strong, independent mechanism for democratic participation in their working conditions, which can only be guaranteed through their labor union.

It is clear that Sexton and the NYU administration have already made their decision and that the Town Hall meeting, while a tremendous outpouring of labor solidarity, was merely the façade of dialogue. The community has no choice but to find other means for the voice of its collective will to be heard.

It was either Keanu or Debord who said "I know deja-fu."

EDIT: here's another account courtesy of Phoebe (who got it from the man Abbey used to call "Tony Dugs", who pulled it off Inside Higher Ed. Which is where the link goes to. Basically, that was an excuse for me to say "Tony Dugs.")

This week's Six Feet Under was actually watchable (except for the nate-maggie bs and keith-turning-into-his-father trope). This is in part because of Patricia Clarkson, in part becuase they seem to have cut back a bit on the "Claire as five year old in twenty-one year old's body" trope, and Ruth and George finally split up, making me less irate about the abominable george-freaks-out flashback from the premiere. If killing off a previous guest star is what it takes to make the show less crappy, though, then the writers may run out of options before the season ends, at which point Gabriel Demas clearly returns from the dead as a vampire and tries to eat Cordelia and Nate finds his true calling as a wisecracking sportscaster opposite the boyfriend from Don't Tell Mom, The Babysitter's Dead. Then he does the Babysitter's funeral, of course.

Kill Your Landlord

It's been a month now since i started apartment-hunting, and right now, after seeing over a dozen apartments in five different brooklyn neighborhoods, i'm pretty much right where i started. The first apartment we looked at was easily the best, and the guy with whom i am looking and i were both dissapointed that we didn't get it. Stuff in the same price range either isn't as big, as well-lit, or is just completely run down, as in the case of one apartment we looked at today in Kensington and another, a three bedroom for $1250 which was not only in real bad shape, bathroomwise, but was also right next to the BQE and extremely noisy because of its proximity to said nightmarish expressway.

Some of the landlords we've interacted seem like perfectly nice people, but these folks are by no means in the majority. (And no, i'm not advocating murder in the title of this post, just quoting the Dead Kennedys -- perhaps as covered by The Coup.) One woman who owned a three-story building on Tompkins Ave in Bed-Stuy complained that we were only the second "good tenants" to look at the place, in the middle of a working-class African American/West -Indian neighborhood, because everyone else was "on section 8." (Is it even legal to refuse to rent to someone because they are recieving section 8 vouchers?) She was clearly interested in making Bed-Stuy wealthier and whiter at the expense of its current residents, and kept describing the neighborhood in terms of its proximity to gentrified Fort Greene.

Then there's the ad on craig's list which demands that any inquiries concerning the 2 bedroom sunset park apartment in question come from people who aren't on "welfare" and demands that applicants supply job and salary information prior to even being allowed to look at the place. I stooped yesterday to a low enough point that actually responded. Haven't heard back.

I saved post 700 for the occasion of my 24th birthday. Which is today. I am older than the entire world except for Alek Felstiner. I am extraordinarily old.

The birthday, which is technically sunday, but which i celebrated tonight, has been awesome. Last year, i did nothing, which made me really sad and added to this feeling that i was letting my life slip through my fingers and wasting away my youth a la Blind Melon's "No Rain." So I'm really glad that this year I got to spend time with good friends, eat good food, and see a film involving really adorable penguins and a way overdone and overly artful uber-anthropomorphized penguin sex scene. No, i'm not kidding. We're talking tasteful zooms. Also, the baby penguins who were walking around with their wings/flippers extended were adorable.

Even got gifts -- a card which almost made me cry involving a monkey, (of course,) a black tee-shirt, and extremely personalized mix cd which is ridiculously cool.

Tomorrow the apartment hunt continues. Hopefully we will find something soon.

About a month ago, I went to see a jazz show with a friend (and a friend of said friend) down on Hudson Street, below Houston. On our way out, we ran into two kids I had never met before who had both also gone to Yale, a year behind us. Of the two, one seemed like a pretty decent person, for someone who didn't like GESO, anyway - (although he was fairly open-minded and willing to engage in conversation about graduate student-employee unionism at 2 in the morning, so I give him some props.) The other guy, whose name I forget, not so much.

He told us he was living in New Haven for the summer, then finishing his undergraduate work the following semester (and over the summer.) Hearing this, I became enthused, because New Haven in the summer is pretty awesome. I recommended that he find a place way far away from Yale and live there and have ridiculous amounts of fun. At this point, relations soured. He cringed, informed me that he didn't want to live in New Haven, but "in Yale," and confided in me that in his apartment last year "all the way out" on Dwight and Elm, he heard gunshots all the time. The next year, rather than moving off campus, he'd be relocating to the toney Eli, the new luxury apartment building on Church and Wall across from the Chase Bank.

Tactless idiot that I am, I nevertheless somehow managed to avoid a loud and obstreporous response to his remarks. I even supressed a chortle when he later asked what it meant to be pompous in:re the individual formerly known as MPM. But after reading this, it seems as good a time as any to ponder the origins and implications of this particular and particularly Yaleic discourse about New Haven as a space simultaneously accesible/to be exploited & enjoyed and one which is to be feared, avoided, excluded, simultaneously a designer drug, a virus, and a quaint atavism, striving to be worthy of its ten thousand Yalies. And yet theirs is the life of Zagat, structured on difference profound, and, in their formulation, unbridgeable. It's good practice for later migration to New York, but don't get too attatched. At home s/he feels like a tourist. Dink Stover as wealthy Greenwichian mallgoer.

This ideological formation has attained at least a partial hegemony among Yale undergraduates, however frayed and contested that hegemony may be -- this remains the default, perhaps peppered with a yen for liberal electoralism and a burning desire for a cushy internship, whether on the Hill (Capitol, i mean) or with Bruce Alexander himself. Future attempts to organize large numbers of undergraduates without the aid of a fast-approaching strike will clearly continue to struggle with what we can no longer rightfully term "apathy."

Of course, this hegemony frays somewhat along the lineaments of class, sexuality, race and gender, as constructed within the nexus of Yale's imperial relationship with its host city, though Stuart Hall, grappling with the sucess of Thatcherism and racism, long ago warned us that there is no simple correspondence between class and ideology, and the constant negotiations of privilege and deprivation suggest both a greater complexity and possible points at which organizing might intercede and find opportunity to maneuver. (The success of financial aid organizing by undergraduates last year exemplifies such a possibility.)

I want to historicize this formation though. I want to figure out where it comes from and how we all swallowed it, and too what extent we all actually did. And then i wanna shove it down the throat of the nearest university president/bruce A. analogue.

(Which is to say that i would love to write more here, but it's very late and i have a somewhat busy day tomorrow.)