The panopticon (aka Elmer Holmes Bobst Library, for those just tuning in) isn't open to the public. Just as one enters the library through its revolving doors, one sees metal and glass turnstiles, hi-tech MTA chick intended to keep out the riffraff and keep knowledge private. As a result, every time i enter the library, I always accidentally reach for my Metrocard instead of my student ID, and thus, in doing so, feel rather ridiculous.

Happy Birthday to my cousin Kai, who turns 4 today.

So give me a spark I can look for instead

My favorite band is breaking up. I feel understandably sad about this. But I'm glad that in eleven years they made seven incredible albums that I listen to almost every day. If the Woods is the last album they ever make, I'm glad that "Night Light" is the conclusion to their catalogue, achingly beautiful and obstinately hopeful. I'm glad that I got to see them three times (the show at the 2002 Siren Music Festival remains the single best set by any band I have ever seen,) and I'm glad I have my ticket to what may be their second-to-last show ever on Aug. 2 at Webster Hall. But I'm still getting all teary eyed, even if I'm not ready to say goodbye yet.




Yesterday, when I wrote that Buffy failed to address race, I neglected to discuss "Pangs," in which a vengeful Chumash spirit gives Xander syphylis and kills a bunch of people and Giles, SPike, Willow, and Buffy get into a stupid fight about political correctness and the legacies of colonial genocide. It's a horrible episode - certainly Jane Espenson's worst for the series - way worse than "First Date," Ashanti and all, and symbolizes for me the failure of the show to address race in a meaningful and valuable way. Plus, the cheap Angel tie-in is stupid, Riley is a doof, and the only good thing about the episode is Anya's constant babbling about sex with Xander, which is actually pretty awesome. Well, the other good thing about pangs is that it provides one of Anya's funniest lines in the song "I'll Never Tell" during the amazing season six musical epic-sode Once More With Feeling. That will have to do for now.

Oh, also, this is awesome.

In These Times takes on Veronica Mars

Christopher Hayes hagiographizes VM as scenes from the class struggle in Neptune, albeit with the ambivalences and complexities of beaucoup de "Stockholm Syndrome" (great Yo La Tengo song, by the way.) I'm trying to churn out some very overdue reading responses and failing miserably at the moment - probably need to get out of the library and work at home for the afternoon, but I'll take a few first to post some of my own thoughts on the class politics of Veronica Mars, which I find somewhat more problematic than Hayes does.

Class fissures lie at the core of Rob Thomas's fictional Southern Californian drama. Veronica and her father are declasse flotsam in a "town without a middle class," in which you are either fantastically wealthy or you scrub the toilets of the people who are. Hayes argues that the series deftly explores the pathologies of class and the antagonsims and resentments of those who look upward from beneath the impenetrable glass ceiling.

Yet i question this analysis on several grounds. First, Neptune's class politics are themselves deeply fanciful. The rich are rich because they were magically swept along in the dotcom boom or made a lot of bad movies. The corporate criminal (Richard Casablancas) is the rare exception. Most of Neptune's nouveau are simply the honest beneficiaries of Jake Kane's streaming video patents. Class is a striation, a marker of difference, here, which functions like a dehistoricized ethnic category or mystical syncretic racial identity rather than as a structure of exploitation. To hypothesize that class difference breeds resentment is not a particulary revolutionary suggestion, yet this is what Hayes thinks is so wonderful about the show and this is the thrust of his article. Yet Veronica Mars fails to present a more nuanced articulation of what class is and how it works. The dehistoricization and mythologization of Neptune's class politics at times makes the series into a sort of Windfall noir. But more importantly, confine class to a manifestation of difference and even inequality but not a structure of exploitation. Though there are moments when the world of the wealthy and the Weevil are tantalizingly intertwined - especially in the series's second episode - for the most part the series understands the underclass as atomized detritus severed from the Whopper McMansions of the elite save for some Crash-styl;e moments of crisis and the occasional Ellisonian Bumfight.

Unlike Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the show's antecedent, which offered what i believe was a more nimble and less stereotyped, if quieter exploration of high school as a central locus of the imaginary of American cultural production, Veronica Mars attempts to deal with race as an ordering mechanism and social force in the lives of Neptune's inhabitants. If Buffy's Sunnydale seems to exist outside the racialized faultlines of California politics for the most part, (with the possible exception of "desde abajo te devora,") Veronica's Neptune seems at first glance to rest solidly at the epicenter of the tremors of violent racialized political exclusion, exploitation, and reaction. From Logan and Dick's racist banter to the sneers of the corrupt, self-aggrandizing Sherriff Lamb, to the machinations of Celeste Kane, the thrillseeking "jungle fever" of Paris Hilton Caitlyn Ford, or Weevil's chivalrous defense of Carmen, Racialized frictions and fissures are constitutive forces in Neptune's social imaginary. Yet Veronica's racial politics not only suffer from a dehistoricized and toothless multiculturalism, but also seem at times to employ problematic, even racist constructions of peoplehood in order to attain an "iconic" representation of southern California which all too often instead stumbles into the clumsy stereotypes of CSI and Law and Order and the criminalizing gaze of Cops. There are also moments where the series does exactly the opposite, and I don't want anyone to mistake me for someone who doesn't think that the show's first season is absolutely fantastic (well, except for the resolution of "A Trip to The Dentist," which was a total and deeply fucked-up cop out of dealing with sexual violence in a serious and complex way.) And whatever my disgust with the many failures of the sophomore season, I will continue to watch season 3 religiously. But if we are going to talk about the class politics of the series, I think our tone has to be much more meditative and critical than that which Hayes adopts.

(As an aside, I played Ollman's Class Struggle board game with Will and Cathy in college. I was the students, and I was allied to the workers. Somehow, I won, which is against the game's rules, but I guess we were playing a post-Seattle variant or something.)

GSOC Walks.

I'm just trying to say the way school need teachers
The way Kathie Lee needed the WRC that's the way yall need GSOC
-Kanye Westerberg

Inspired by my recent brush with the Jews for Jesus, I would like to announce the founding of the Jews for GSOC. To paraphrase a certain flyer I received in the mail two days ago, GSOC is for the Jews. And the muslims. And the atheists. And all the other graduate employees. I forsee the founding of similar organizations across academe. These organizations can all band together into the Coalition of Graduate Employee Jews (CGEJew,) and, as Jews who believe in social justice and the sanctity of workers' rights, organize to reshape the academy accordingly. Surely this and other endeavors are far more useful for the Jewish community than evangelical christianity.

I'm mostly kidding. Don't get offended.

Pelo corto otra vez

Rides beside me and never buys any smokes.

I'm being targeted by the Jews for Jesus. Somehow they have obtained my home address and are sending me mailings in which they attempt to persuade me that, though i may believe otherwise, Jesus is for me.

I'm deeply offended by the Jews for Jesus. It isn't the Jesus part that offends me. Nothing against Jesus, as long as we're talking IWW/CCNE-style, direct action "Jesus was a wobbly" Jesus and not Pat Robertson/Pat Boone/Rick Santorum "Jesus hates queers" Jesus. "Jesus is just alright with me," as Millie put it. Ok, maybe the Byrds did it first. No, my problem is the predatory, evangelical agenda which suggests to me a prfound and militant imperialism of belief. I don't really care if you call yourself a Jew for Jesus. I would refer to such a person as a Christian, because, if you read the New Testament, that's what all those apostle dudes and dudettes and transduderinos are - Jews who dig the Jeebus. Hooray for them. It's the saturation of college campuses, the unsolicited mailings, the profound conviction that Jewish life and cultures -to which i have a complex and at times very ambivalent relationship stemming from antizionist politics and secular upbringing - are only valid if colonized by fundamentalist Christianity. I don't support that and I don't want it in my mailbox. So if you're reading this, Jews for Jesus, stop sending me crap.

The return address is from San Francisco and I am thus tempted to blame Alek.

Sorry for the rant.


Funniest recent search hit which led to this site:

"michigan weapon registration ninja." Someone clearly wants to join the UAW's ninjitsu brigade.

Well, either that, or the Michigan Militia are reforming and going the "totally stealth" route.

breaking

apparently Unite-HERE local 6 has settled with the NY Hotel Association on a six-year contract with raises between 3.5 and 4% each year, strong health care coverage, increased pension contributions, and increased sick day and vacation time. More when details are available.

While I have your attention, I would like to point out the seven new additions to the "Ask Me About The Strike" sidebar - some further notes from the last three months of NYU labor turmoil, including the entry on the Civil Disobedience, my last two song rewrites (Replacements and Benatar), and more.