"culture vulture shit"

Nick Sylvester already said it, but i'll add my take, in part cause i think he's wrong to back off when he does: Diplo's decision on Favela Strikes Back, his hip-hoppy, sample-heavy carioca funk mix-cd, to omit any information about the brazilian artists and songs over which he splices beats derived from The Smiths' "Bigmouth Strikes Again" and The Eurythmics' "Sweet Dreams," and Dee-Lite's "Groove Is In The Heart," among others, from the liner notes or track information, is more than a bit fucked up.

Granted, this is a mixtape, and the whole point of mixtapes is that you can experiment because you don't have to pay for the samples. And some of this music will be familiar to people who've purchased one of the other baile funk comps or mixes flooding the hipster market eager for new marginalized global south social movements to exoticize. But Diplo isn't giving valuable space to the next hot MC from Queensbridge or Houston, someone every backpacker worth her salt will recognize before they complete the first rhyme of their first verse, he's buying craploads of favela funk cds and sampling at will. Wesley Pentz doesn't speak portuguese. Which would be fine - some of the funk lyrics are flat-out gibberish, nonsensic transliterations of English hip hop phrases by working class Brazilians who speak no English - but there's a coloniality here i nevertheless find deeply troubling. I don't care too much if Morissey and Marr or Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart are getting stiffed on royalties here. But it's safe to say that whoever Diplo's sampling aren't getting any recognition for their work. Instead, Diplo is presenting himself as a postmodern colonial ethnographer, presenting this music as faceless, timeless, absent of context or meaning.

I want to direct folks looking for a more complex encounter with and reading of Baile Funk to turn to George Yudice's recent book The Expediency of Culture, which examines funk and its funkeiros in illuminating detail and scholarly rigor.

the new panda

totally off-topic, but oh my god is this cute

the new danger

Re: the title change. Alright. Education In The Streets was clearly about being an undergraduate at Yale University in the context of the continuing struggles of Yale's workers to reshape the university's divisions of labor and axes of difference, challenge its imperial conquests in New Haven, Colorado, and Indonesia, and constitute and make possible new visions of what education can and should look like in New Haven and around the country. The Problem of Leisure, all 742 posts of it, was supposed to be about culture and globalization, and sometimes it was. Sometimes it wound up mostly being about, well, me having way too much leisure -- little bit ironic, mostly just frustrating. My discomfort with the recent cash-in by the band whose lyrics i took as the blog's title had been impelling me towards a name change for a while, and I hope the new title will lend itself to an exploration not only of being a graduate student in the imperial university, but also into some of the things i wanted to, but didn't always get around to doing here in the past.

Oh, and lest i forget, I would like to thank Richard C. Levin. In the words of Chicago, Rick, "You're The Inspiration."

I had no idea Carol King was still alive. Not only is she alive and well, she has an iTunes celebrity playlist. So does Frank Black, and, in perhaps the most punk rock iTunes celebrity playlist ever, Mr Thompson has selected Burl Ives and only Burl Ives. The Bacon Brothers (Kevin and whatshisface) have one too. I saw Kevin Bacon on the street a couple weeks ago with his guitar. In his celebrity playlist he describes Rancid's "Time Bomb" as "classic punk." Which would be fine, except it's actually a ska song, albeit a hyphenated one, and debates about the construction of canons and the periodization of punk notwithstanding, it came out in like 1995, a good sixteen years after "post-punk," and treads on ground already covered by guitarist Tim "Lint" Armstrong's first band in the late 1980s, which was itself strongly influenced by both the 2-tone ska revival in the UK, the reggae-punk of the Clash (no, seriously, the clash influenced someone. Who'da thunk?) and the US disciples -- e.g., Bad Brains and Fishbone, for two. All of these bands were total genrefuckers. Maybe punk rock's at its best when it's hybridizing and diffusing and infiiltrating (not expropriatng and enclosing.) Which is to say that "classic punk" is a deeply problematic notion. What is "classic punk" anyway? The Stooges? The Ramones? '77? The first three notes of and only the first three notes of "Clash City Rockers?" It's 1:03 AM. Do you know where your univerdsity's endowment is?

So it turns out Conrad Harper resigned because the rest of the Harvard Corporation wanted, after a no confidence vote from the faculty, to reprimand Larry Summers for his rousing odes to eugenics by, uh, giving him a %3 raise. Meanwhile no one on the Yale corporation seems thus far capable of the show of scruples necessary to make plain the discontent (which they, granted, seem not to possess) with Levin's own callous indifference cum vituperative vehemence towards the academic workers who make his presidency and his university work, contributing to the starkly gendered hierarchies in fields like psychology and political science which, as GESO argued in February, are as unnaceptable as Summers' comments.

Boycott The Intercontinental Boston

Bostonist's post on the AFL-CIO/CtW split big-ups Local 26, where I worked last year, and links to their brand new website on the Intercontinental hotel, which is building a massive luxury hotel and trying to sell condos right next to the Big Dig, and whose operators have refused to agree to a card check agreement with the union so that their workers can have the freedom to organize free from harassment, intimidation, and fear. Intercontinental, a British corporation, is deeply implicated in last year's lockout and the continuing contract stalemate in San Francisco.

If anyone reading this blog is at the stage in his or her life where he or she can afford and is looking to purchase a luxury condominium in a luxury hotel in the second most expensive real estate market in the U.S., you should eschew the Intercontinental for all the labor, construction, and environmental and safety issues enumerated by the fine folks at Local 26 on the web site and instead think about a union property, lke The Ritz Carlton Boston, or The Ritz Carlton Boston Common. The Ritz Carlton Boston Common is a block away from the Hyatt Regency Boston Financial District, which you damn well better boycott as well. And stay out of the Hyatt Regency Cambridge too.

commuting while "foreign-looking?"

This has been emailed around this morning. Is it a culture jam or simply the grotesque irony of administrative racial violence written into the mundanely disruptive format of subway service changes? I hope the former but fear the latter.