The last couple of days have been intense and frustrating. I believe that, 88 days in the strike (we're a fucking piano, folks,) things are moving in the right direction on several fronts. I am quite certain that none of this is going to be anywhere remotely close to easy. I also feel like going to sleep at some point before 8:30 AM this morning might have, in retrospect, been a very good idea and that the city should really stop this whole "No R service between 59th street and Pacific Street on the weekend" bullshit. But I think there were a lot of things about yesterday to inspire confidence and to be excited about working on. And there were some things to be frustrated about, of course. ([redacted], you need to stop storming out of meetings. To paraphrase AMK, it just get [sic] less funny and more sad every time.) But I want to say how inspired I am by all the folks who've gotten the lockout letters from the administration and are holding their ground and refusing to let themselves and their colleagues be silenced or defeated by John Sexton's brutal, but also in some ways last-ditch effort to force us back to work. Like one of them said several months ago,

"Despite all the bastards, we're still on strike."

It's been seven years to the day since Amadou Diallo was gunned down by four police officers in the vestibule of his building on Sedgewick Avenue in Soundville.

Even as the amount of high profile cases of racialized police brutality have declined with the exit of Giuliani and the lionization of the NYPD as 9/11 martyr, the role of the police as the neoliberal bourgeoisie's agents of gentrification at gunpoint has continued, and the widescale repression of thousands of people during the 2004 RNC "rent-a-city" occupation and subsequent sustained harassment and intimidation of Critical Mass bicyclists are perhaps some of the most visible illustrations of this. But of course, distinctly racialized assaults on immigrants and people of color have hardly dissapeared over the past four years as well, as the folks arrested in the SWAT attack on a Critical Resistance fundraising party can attest.

New York has not forgotten the Amadou Diallos and Abner Louimas and Patrick Dorismonds, but memory isn't enough. How can we build a city in which working class people of color and immigrants aren't targets, aren't palimpsests on which state violence can be written by billioaire politicians who call striking workers "selfish thugs" and their armed guard ready to make Mott Haven safe for yuppies and unaffordable for anyone else?

Thomas:

But to read Science Park at Yale as simply a uncomplicated contrast between
two diametrically opposed (but dialectically inseparable) realities – a
romantically recollected industrial past versus a privatized, antiseptic biotech
future – overlooks a third narrative we might also investigate on Winchester
Ave.

Exploring the factories themselves– the vast majority of which have still
yet to completely crumble or be converted – one encounters a plethora of ways
individuals have endeavored to subvert the space. Despite the barbed wire,
homeless residents of Science Park at Yale have managed to squat inside;
graffiti writers have painted colorful murals on the walls of the inside
courtyards; and young punk kids high on Guy Debord and Raoul Vaneigem scale
rooftops late at night to see the city stretch out before them.

Day 85 addendum

Something the WSN reported today, which i'd only heard rumors about until tonight, concerning two of the six locked-out teachers (soon to be more, in all likelihood.) Holly Lewis and Matt Osypowski, creative writing MFA students who teach in NYU's expository writing program, may lose not only their pay and their jobs, but also their tuition remission and their health care coverage. NYU is going to lock them out and send them a huge bill. They get to pay their employer tens of thousands of dollars for the privilege of being forced out on strike.

I'll end and call it a night by quoting Jenny from today's WSN

When I went on strike on Nov. 9, I did so anticipating that I could lose my
wages for the duration of the strike — despite the fact that NYU does not
consider my labor “work.” But the administration has not just decided to take
away our pay for as long as we are on strike, NYU’s draconian decision is to
blacklist GAs by firing them from their teaching positions and terminating their
pay for the following two semesters. NYU is punishing striking GAs in the future
for our decision to stand up to the administration today....
NYU’s attempts to bully and intimidate striking GAs and the
administration’s determination to keep us out of the classroom in future
semesters suggests that they don’t care about undergraduate education at all.
The administration’s indifference to undergraduate, graduate and faculty voices
at this university only serves to underscore the importance of our fight and the
reasons that the Graduate Student Organizing Committe must prevail.

the book i see more people reading in university libraries across the country is dick hebdige's Subculture; The Meaning of Style. Discuss.

I'm a useless organizer, i'm feeling profoundly alienated from American Studies, (although not so much my cohort anymore, which is nice) and I kind of want to go find a corner and cry a la Axl in "Sweet Child Of Miiiine" for fifteen minutes and then get myself together and do something useful. Instead I'm going to get up, go back to my table here in the panopticon, finish the last hundred pages of Limits to Capital, go home, go to sleep, wake up, read some Capital, think about why I'm in this fight, why I'm in graduate school, and what I need to be doing to help us win this fight.

Folks reading this can do any or all of the following things a)Donate to the strike fund. Six people are now locked out for a year. This is only the beginning of the repressive apparatus the administration is going to bring to bear on us as the strike continues, and while we are mobilizing to stay out and stay strong, we need your support. That doesn't just mean money. You can b)Contact the NYU administration and register your outrage.
John Sexton, President
Tel: (212) 998-2345
Fax: (212) 995-4790
john.sexton@nyu.edu
c) Come to our rallies and actions. I'll post dates and times when i know them.
d)give me a call sometime and help me stay sane

Pierre Hotel.

slim posts for now because i'm up to my proliferation of nostril hairs in Limits to Capital and still have to read the first hundred pages or so of Capital and also am supposed to be on the Upper East Side for weapons of class instruction-related program activities (by which i mean the strike) in exactly two minutes (i am currently in Sunset Park, having fallen back asleep after my alarm rang.)