Wal-Mart stirred outrage yesterday when its Web site suggested thatUpdate: here's more from the Washington Post.
shoppers who wanted to buy a "Planet of the Apes" DVD would be interested in
biopics of famous black Americans like Martin Luther King Jr.
The giant
retailer blamed a computer glitch for the "offensive" recommendations - and said
it was overhauling its online operations until a fix could be made.
"We are
heartsick that this happened and are currently doing everything possible to
correct the problem," Wal-Mart spokeswoman Mona Williams said. "We are deeply
sorry that this happened."
When visitors to Walmart.com plug in the name of
a movie they want, the site also pulls up the name of several other "similar
items" they might like.
For instance, a shopper who enters "Million Dollar
Baby" is offered other 2004 hits like "The Aviator" and "Ray."
But in the
case of "Planet of the Apes," consumers who clicked on the DVD of the original
TV series - a cult classic in which the Earth is ruled by gorillas - were routed
to four movies about King, actress Dorothy Dandridge, boxer Jack Johnson and
singer Tina Turner.
New Yorkers were disturbed.
"They are making a
statement relating apes to black movies?" wondered Denise Brown, 36, of East New
York, Brooklyn. "'Planet of the Apes' was a science fiction movie. What does
Martin Luther King have to do with that?"
"It's outrageous. I've never heard
of anything like that," the Rev. Al Sharpton said when he was told of the
pairings.
"They need to straighten it out, and if they do not clarify what
happened, we need to take some action."
Friday, January 6, 2006
Always Racist. Always
Oh, Walmart.
Thursday, January 5, 2006
..."and you're history!:" Buffy vs. The University
Being a semi-procrastinatory interlude from paper writing, in which i dispense on Buffy and academe.
In season four of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the eponymous (is that the correct usage?)protagonist, having, the previous spring, blown up her high school in order to kill the gigantic snake demon into which the mayor of Sunnydale transformed himself, begins college at the (obviously fictional) UC Sunnydale. In her first days of college, Buffy has to deal with feelings of inadequacy as a student, gets yelled out of a lecture hall by a sexist cultural studies professor on her first day of classes, and must fend off the soul-sucking advances of a demon roomate, who doesn't pee on floors, but does listen to copious amounts of Celine Dion and attempts to siphon off Buffy's life force while she sleeps. A couple of months into the semester, Buffy starts dating her Psychology TA, a strapping young grad student from Iowa named Riley Finn, who is secretly not only a graduate student but a steroidally-enhanced commando secret agent working for the shadowy military initiative operating beneath the campus, which is attempting to control, breed, and harness Sunnydale's demonic population for covert military uses.
No one bats an eye over the fact that Riley is dating Buffy while he is grading her work. The writers at times seem unsure of whether he is a graduate student or simply an older undergraduate - he refers to himself as a "psychology major," but Buffy observes in a later episode, "you know, there's nothing more dangerous than a psych grad student". Later, after he says something ridiculously cheesy to Professor Walsh, she refers to Riley as a "college boy in love." The list goes on, but let's operate under the presumption that, despite the fact than in many psych departments (as is the case at NYU,) undergrads are TAed by other undergrads, while PhD students tend to TA Masters courses, Riley is a graduate student.
Riley and his buds know all the ins and outs about which undergrads on campus are dating each other and which upperclassmen prove to be total man-skanks. They live in frat-houses-cum-secret-government laboratories and hold frat parties at which undergrad bands play. Now, i have never attended a large state university like the fictional UC Sunnydale, and I don't really know what grad student life is like there, but i kind of doubt that a teaching assistant would tell one of his undergraduates he barely knows about the sexual habits of another undergrad, much less know anything about said habits. But then again, I'm not a TA yet, and won't be ever if i don't finish these damn papers. Nevertheless, this is one of the few things over the course of the series that the writers simply get wrong. I posit that graduate students are something of a semi-subaltern category in Buffy who can be integrated into the show's representative schema of university life only as older undergrads with secret lives who occasionally grade papers and dress up in camoulflage. This is not the same kind of subalternity as that occupied, say, by the high school lunchlady in the Season 3 episode "Earshot," in which said food service employee only becomes visible and audible when she attempts to murder all the students by pouring rat poison in the Jello mixture, chases down Xander with a butcher's knife, and is beaten senseless by Buffy. Instead, following Kathy Newman's analysis of 90210 and other texts, Buffy constructs TAs as potential objects of romantic attachment and also calculating and dissimulating, posessing hybrid and shifting identities, suspended between graduations, and between the university and the military-industrial complex which sits, quite literally, beneath it.
(We will skip over entirely Maggie Walsh, our tenured(?) psych professor/murderous mad military scientist,whose secret project is to create "Adam," a hybrid subject, of sorts, assembled from computers (complete with floppy disk drives) and the body parts of humans, vampires, and demonic entities.)
Newman links representations in Marathon Man to the early years of the explosion of casualization of teaching. She then turns to the college years of Beverly Hills 90210, exploring the politics of social and sexual reproduction in the academy between Brandon, Dylan, et. al. and their shady/sketchy TAs during the early years of GESO's organizing campaign. "Beware graduate students - they might study something useless, kill you, or seduce your children." ("Poor, Hungry, and Desperate? Or Privileged, Histrionic, and Demanding? In Search of the True Meaning of 'Ph. D.'" Kathy M. Newman. Social Text, No. 49, The Yale Strike Dossier. (Winter, 1996), pp. 97-131.)
The fourth season of Buffy began airing in the fall of 1999 and ended in the fall of 2000. (Riley's story, in which, feeling taken for granted by an otherwise occupied Vampire Slayer, the now ex-graduate student, ex-commando becomes addicted to dangerous intercourse with the undead and leaves Sunnydale to hunt monsters in South America, concluded midway through the fifth season, in an episode which aired in December of 2000.) These years were tumultous and crucial in the shifting dynamics of academic capitalism and the social construction of graduate employees. They saw new arrangements of casualization - adjunctization, "postdoc"ization, etc., and renewed organizing at several private universities and a series of National Labor Relations Board decisions which ultimately granted workers at NYU and other private universities the status of "worker" and the right to Wagner act protections concerning organizing and bargaining. Buffy the Vampire Slayer's deft exploration of the logics and contradictions of secondary schooling through metaphor and parody has been repeatedly noted by critics and scholars, but the deep skepticism in the post-high school years over the politics, entanglements, and assumptions of contemporary universities demands deeper inquiry.
In season four of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the eponymous (is that the correct usage?)protagonist, having, the previous spring, blown up her high school in order to kill the gigantic snake demon into which the mayor of Sunnydale transformed himself, begins college at the (obviously fictional) UC Sunnydale. In her first days of college, Buffy has to deal with feelings of inadequacy as a student, gets yelled out of a lecture hall by a sexist cultural studies professor on her first day of classes, and must fend off the soul-sucking advances of a demon roomate, who doesn't pee on floors, but does listen to copious amounts of Celine Dion and attempts to siphon off Buffy's life force while she sleeps. A couple of months into the semester, Buffy starts dating her Psychology TA, a strapping young grad student from Iowa named Riley Finn, who is secretly not only a graduate student but a steroidally-enhanced commando secret agent working for the shadowy military initiative operating beneath the campus, which is attempting to control, breed, and harness Sunnydale's demonic population for covert military uses.
No one bats an eye over the fact that Riley is dating Buffy while he is grading her work. The writers at times seem unsure of whether he is a graduate student or simply an older undergraduate - he refers to himself as a "psychology major," but Buffy observes in a later episode, "you know, there's nothing more dangerous than a psych grad student". Later, after he says something ridiculously cheesy to Professor Walsh, she refers to Riley as a "college boy in love." The list goes on, but let's operate under the presumption that, despite the fact than in many psych departments (as is the case at NYU,) undergrads are TAed by other undergrads, while PhD students tend to TA Masters courses, Riley is a graduate student.
Riley and his buds know all the ins and outs about which undergrads on campus are dating each other and which upperclassmen prove to be total man-skanks. They live in frat-houses-cum-secret-government laboratories and hold frat parties at which undergrad bands play. Now, i have never attended a large state university like the fictional UC Sunnydale, and I don't really know what grad student life is like there, but i kind of doubt that a teaching assistant would tell one of his undergraduates he barely knows about the sexual habits of another undergrad, much less know anything about said habits. But then again, I'm not a TA yet, and won't be ever if i don't finish these damn papers. Nevertheless, this is one of the few things over the course of the series that the writers simply get wrong. I posit that graduate students are something of a semi-subaltern category in Buffy who can be integrated into the show's representative schema of university life only as older undergrads with secret lives who occasionally grade papers and dress up in camoulflage. This is not the same kind of subalternity as that occupied, say, by the high school lunchlady in the Season 3 episode "Earshot," in which said food service employee only becomes visible and audible when she attempts to murder all the students by pouring rat poison in the Jello mixture, chases down Xander with a butcher's knife, and is beaten senseless by Buffy. Instead, following Kathy Newman's analysis of 90210 and other texts, Buffy constructs TAs as potential objects of romantic attachment and also calculating and dissimulating, posessing hybrid and shifting identities, suspended between graduations, and between the university and the military-industrial complex which sits, quite literally, beneath it.
(We will skip over entirely Maggie Walsh, our tenured(?) psych professor/murderous mad military scientist,whose secret project is to create "Adam," a hybrid subject, of sorts, assembled from computers (complete with floppy disk drives) and the body parts of humans, vampires, and demonic entities.)
Newman links representations in Marathon Man to the early years of the explosion of casualization of teaching. She then turns to the college years of Beverly Hills 90210, exploring the politics of social and sexual reproduction in the academy between Brandon, Dylan, et. al. and their shady/sketchy TAs during the early years of GESO's organizing campaign. "Beware graduate students - they might study something useless, kill you, or seduce your children." ("Poor, Hungry, and Desperate? Or Privileged, Histrionic, and Demanding? In Search of the True Meaning of 'Ph. D.'" Kathy M. Newman. Social Text, No. 49, The Yale Strike Dossier. (Winter, 1996), pp. 97-131.)
The fourth season of Buffy began airing in the fall of 1999 and ended in the fall of 2000. (Riley's story, in which, feeling taken for granted by an otherwise occupied Vampire Slayer, the now ex-graduate student, ex-commando becomes addicted to dangerous intercourse with the undead and leaves Sunnydale to hunt monsters in South America, concluded midway through the fifth season, in an episode which aired in December of 2000.) These years were tumultous and crucial in the shifting dynamics of academic capitalism and the social construction of graduate employees. They saw new arrangements of casualization - adjunctization, "postdoc"ization, etc., and renewed organizing at several private universities and a series of National Labor Relations Board decisions which ultimately granted workers at NYU and other private universities the status of "worker" and the right to Wagner act protections concerning organizing and bargaining. Buffy the Vampire Slayer's deft exploration of the logics and contradictions of secondary schooling through metaphor and parody has been repeatedly noted by critics and scholars, but the deep skepticism in the post-high school years over the politics, entanglements, and assumptions of contemporary universities demands deeper inquiry.
Wednesday, January 4, 2006
Like many, i've been saddened by the reports from the Sago mine in West Virginia. Jordan Barab has a post which everyone needs to read. Barab refutes the company's assertion that the disaster was caused by a lightning bolt and instead locates the blame in the Republican-corporate assault on Occupational Safety and Health enforcement.
My thoughts are with the families and friends of the workers who didn't make it, and with the survivors of the landslide in Indonesia.
My thoughts are with the families and friends of the workers who didn't make it, and with the survivors of the landslide in Indonesia.
Donate to the GSOC Strike Fund
Folks have asked me about how to contribute to the striker hardship fund. You can now do so online. Thanks for whatever you can contribute.
Tuesday, January 3, 2006
3.a little bit louder
Asad has a fantastic post on the strike, dealing particularly with the ramifications of the new policies for language and literature teachers as advancing rather than molliating casualization and thinking about the strike's relationship to the humanities. In the process, he gets Bordieuian:
I find Asad's description of the picket line as a performative and carnivalesque space which deconstructs and disrupts the quotidian dynamics of academic labor explooitation compelling. The radical possibilities implicit in this kind of interruption were, after all, what fueled actions like this one, which I return to again and again because it was such a formative moment for me in how I think about what we are fighting for and how universities work (and how we can build new configurations of knowledge production and create new conversations and new ways of having them which challenge the neoliberal frameworks of University Leadership Teams and Roland Betts-led 15 Billion Dollar corporations. What is particularly interesting to me about Asad's argument is the move it makes to look at the polemicisists and polemics of collegiality as profoundly reactionary in a way which invites useful scrutiny of what's at stake in the idyllic phantasm of the university's proud (tacitly imperial) pastness and tradition and ownership of a bright, rich future raised by the Sextons and Stimpys and their analogues elsewhere.
We need to understand the strike as more than simple refusal to work and disruption of "business as usual." What new kinds of arrangements of academic labor, what radical reimagining of the university does the strike produce, and how do we create that new university "from the ashes of the Old Campus?" (As Ralph Chaplin might have put it were he still alive and had he not become a raving anticommunist in his later years.) These are questions our organizing will have to answer somehow. I'm kind of looking forward to it.
Here I might return to the theme of "collegiality." The picket line, with
its chanting, drumming, singing - in short, its performativity - is by its
nature often carnivalesque: not only the ordinary collegial etiquette, but the
very habitus, or social and bodily disposition, of university life is suspended
by it. The result is an unleashing of pent-up energies and frustrations of many
kinds, including elements that exceed the basis of the conflict, such as the
offensive nature of the university's communications with graduate assistants.
This is why the defense of collegiality has become an important high ground to
the administration: harping on it allows the picket line's symbolic excess to be
depicted as a form of reactive immaturity. Paradoxically, immaturity is also
seen to be a form of belatedness: Sexton's euphemistic corporate terminology of
an "Enterprise University" and "University Leadership Team" leaves no room such
"dated" practices as strikes and protests, and the supposedly expired sixties
radicalism from which they are thought to stem. Just as the domain of the
humanities is linked to anachronistic countercultural protest, so then is the
social practice of picketing. On both counts, we're both too young and too old,
past our sell-by date before we grow up. This argumentative tack, however,
allows for the obfuscation of the original conflict. Even so, analyzed as a
cultural form, the picket line performs an important function: it inscribes and
instantiates the strike both to observers and in the minds and bodies of those
striking. As Louis Althusser might have said, it "interpellates" (roughly,
allows the self-recognition of) those who take part, and thus functions as a
radicalizing action. Insofar as it refuses collegial dialogue and substitutes
the implacable presence of the bodies of strikers, picketing only belongs more
purely to the category of action.
I find Asad's description of the picket line as a performative and carnivalesque space which deconstructs and disrupts the quotidian dynamics of academic labor explooitation compelling. The radical possibilities implicit in this kind of interruption were, after all, what fueled actions like this one, which I return to again and again because it was such a formative moment for me in how I think about what we are fighting for and how universities work (and how we can build new configurations of knowledge production and create new conversations and new ways of having them which challenge the neoliberal frameworks of University Leadership Teams and Roland Betts-led 15 Billion Dollar corporations. What is particularly interesting to me about Asad's argument is the move it makes to look at the polemicisists and polemics of collegiality as profoundly reactionary in a way which invites useful scrutiny of what's at stake in the idyllic phantasm of the university's proud (tacitly imperial) pastness and tradition and ownership of a bright, rich future raised by the Sextons and Stimpys and their analogues elsewhere.
We need to understand the strike as more than simple refusal to work and disruption of "business as usual." What new kinds of arrangements of academic labor, what radical reimagining of the university does the strike produce, and how do we create that new university "from the ashes of the Old Campus?" (As Ralph Chaplin might have put it were he still alive and had he not become a raving anticommunist in his later years.) These are questions our organizing will have to answer somehow. I'm kind of looking forward to it.
Monday, January 2, 2006
Call Me Alan Lomax.
Dredging up some old classics- first, Alyssa's briliant "New Haven Pie," then, my vastly inferior "Sucker PhDs." Both written just over two years ago. (Hey Alyssa, if you want me to tale this down,please let me know.)
"New Haven Pie" was probably the best of the song rewrites we did, though "Forgot about Pay," "Strike Strike Baby," and Josh's take on Cyndi Lauper's "Time After Time" were all pretty enjoyable. I especially love the line about the YDN chasing us down on bikes. That was hilarious. I conclude with "Sucker PhDs," which was my best contribution. I have redacted a couple names and changed a few particularly bad lines around, but left most of them intact.
New Haven Pie
Not such a long time ago
I can still remember
When the unions, they first made me smile
And I learned that if he had the chance
Slick Rick would screw them in a flash
And that left me conflicted for a while
But if March snowstorms made me shiver
Levin's letters made me quiver
Flat lies on the doorstep
They made me take one more step
I know that there were times I cried
And days I really had to try
But Meg's words touched me deep inside
The day Yale's honor died
So... Bye, bye to this Rick Levin guy
He's a craven in new Haven, and nobody will cry
And the Federation will raise their glasses up high
Singing "For the Social Contract we'll strive!
To make New Haven come alive!"
The Daily wrote the book on strikes
Chased down UOCers on their bikes
To find out what they thought we'd know
Now do you believe in recognition?
Will you raise a sign, sign our petition?
And will you teach Woodbridge not to act so slow?
And we all know I love leftist guys
Whether organizers or in PR guise
'Cause they do their jobs so well
I love helping them give Levin hell
I was a lonely freshman liberal
Prime UOC organizing material
And Zach helped show me what was real
The day Yale's honor died
I started singing... Bye, bye to ONHSA's clever disguise
There are problems in New Haven and I want to know why
And the good old boys can stop telling me their lies
This'll be the day that they die
And for the real story I'll try
Now for decades Yale's been in a snit
Organized working people give them fits
But that's not how it used to be
When kids from Hillhouse went to school here
And Bulldog victories raised townie cheers
(All this came long 'fore you and me)
But while Yale improved itself all around
Manufacturing left this town
Redevelopment failed
And town-gown relations ailed
And while Rae wrote his book called City
Life for his subjects wasn't pretty
And he must not have felt so witty
The day Yale's honor died
We were singing...
Why, why, can't our school even try?
This is lame, I'm quite ashmed, some days it just makes me cry
When pensions and benefits are only pie in the sky
Why do they even bother with lies?
Why do they even bother with lies?
Sit-down protests in the August swelter
The police made arrests to give freshmen shelter
The riot cops were moving fast
While we camped out on the grass
Betty T. tried to sneak on past
And to keep us on the sidelines to the last
And all the plans we'd made since June
Got carried out to chants (off-tune)
We were ready to advance
But we never got the chance
'Cause though they tried to deal and wield
By September Yale just had to yield
Do you recall what we concealed?
The day Yale's honor died
We started singing...
My, my, wasn't that a good try
When labor joins with neighbors then the management cries
And 'cause John Wilhelm helped us organize
Now GESO'll be recognized
And the hospital prioritized
And we got together in one place
To discuss wages, gender, free speech and race
After three days we started again
Marissa and Helena wrote some scripts
Noah and Josh called the press real quick
'Cause the Register isn't always labor's friend
And though Bruce tried to be quite sage
His promises hit the front page
No more equivocating
Their racist policies got done in
And as we celebrated that fight
A victory for what was right
I saw Levin cowering with fright
The day Yale's honor died
He was moaning why, why, am I this town's fall guy?
We're good neighbors, do some favors (at least sometimes we try)
So we're good old boys, why did their goodwill run dry?
Now out of Tweed their airplanes can fly! (Even if in poverty workers
die...)
I met a guy who did some press
All autumn long he made me guess
Although he never turned away
I went down to the office doors
Where I'd found justice, months before
And they said there that we wouldn't take it any more...
And in the streets, the workers chanted
Levin issued statements, then recanted
And with the contracts settled
Bank hearings we bedeviled
And the organizer I admired most, Meg Robertson, got a new post
She and her partner hit the coast
After Yale's honor died
I started singing... Bye, bye, now I'm not going to cry
We've got battles, can't get rattled, and we've tactics to try
And thanks to your committment, now I can organize
Fight for justice 'til the day that I die!
"New Haven Pie" was probably the best of the song rewrites we did, though "Forgot about Pay," "Strike Strike Baby," and Josh's take on Cyndi Lauper's "Time After Time" were all pretty enjoyable. I especially love the line about the YDN chasing us down on bikes. That was hilarious. I conclude with "Sucker PhDs," which was my best contribution. I have redacted a couple names and changed a few particularly bad lines around, but left most of them intact.
RUN-UOC is BACK.
"Sucker Ph.Ds"
To the tune of Sucker MCs, from the album "RUN-DMC"
[RUN: Revolutionary Underground Network]
Two years ago
some friends of mine
asked me to stand up and organize
cause it is time to make a better day
yale's fascism is not ok
so we founded the UOC
and fought for justice in our city
Yale's gentrification is totally wack
Of light and truth there's a serious lack
they bled the workers down to the bone
And their bank will not give anybody a loan
Yale's money is its golden calf, workers starve, Yalecorp laughs
Champagne caviar, and bubble bath
That's the "life" that they lead
And those greedy CEOs are who they please
But they better move back cause we're on attack
Because there's nothin in the world, that could ever hold us back
I cold chill at the strike tent in a pissed off stance
And when I march through the streets I just wanna dance
Take off kid gloves, we attack from above
You capitalist pigs don't know the meaning of love
We rock this city from Morris Cove to The Hill
And [organize] the hospital with [EDITED]
Levin's cruisin for a bruisin',; he best move or step aside
I cannot even count all the many ways they lied
can't wait to see the looks on their faces
When they hear bout the class action suit cases
well it's been [five] years since i got in this fight
And all you sucker PhDs, you just ain't right
Because you're causin' all this strife, you're cheating us of life
You strut around town where such poverty is rife
showin off what you have, actin' like a fool
And everybody knows what things you do
Yeah you oppress me, and it ain't fun
You don't even care, like Linda MaSON!
We're all up in your face with steel toed boot and lace
We're buildin 'our committee put a movement on your case
You live Uptown in your cap and your gown
But we're cellular like Susan Crown!
You better start running now just as fast as you can
Get out of New Haven, take Mike Morand
You are out of time, your corporate crime
is passe like [Bob Culver] or like Meghan Clyne
Exploit black neighborhoods, and the brown
Try to deceive us but your scheme is found
Around your finger you think we're so tightly wound
You're just a sucker Ph.D you fascist clown
So UOC and if you're ready
The people rockin steady
Drive through Yale's lies like Mario Andretti! (Respect to Q-Tip)
[U.O.C.]We're U.O.C. and you know that we
Do go to Yale University
And while organizin' we acquired the knowledge
One usually cannot receive in college
they have sinned, stole workers means
But we'll dethrone these capitalist fiends
They take their fill, rob us through guile
but they can't stop us - we're versatile
Behind closed doors you call us retards
But we're more like the parisian communards
This town you exploit is our home
You won't find that in any Doug Rae tome
We are sticking in this fight
So you had better start doing what's right
or come time, you'll throw a fit
when we bury you up to you neck in Shhhhhhh
You will quake when you hear our refrain
you'll jump around just like HOUSE of PAIN
[You think that you're a classes shop]
Your union busting ways have got to stop
Cause you have lost any semblance of sense
And things are about to get real intense.
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