I went to the corner store yesterday to get a hot chocolate (shut up) and there was a gray kitten sitting on the stack of New York Posts, licking itself, its limbs occasionally flailing about so as to land on the adjacent sunday Times. This would make a cute lolcats, I though to myself, and then I realized i really need to get out more.

This sense of perpetual confinement to my laptop, even when i'm unproductive, is what i hate most about graduate school, this loneliness and dread which are really much to trivial to merit any complaint that doesn't come off as profoundly bourgeois, in a lament of the overprivileged/white man's burden sort of way.

In any event I used to be much better at this whole self motivation thing, when mutual respect and charitable relations came only from below and I somehow managed to read three to five books a week in between committee meetings and organizing conversations and the rest of life. Which begs the question, have i been sniffing glue in my sleep? Eating lead paint in my pasta? What, in the words of Veronica Sawyer, is my damage?

I went for a walk today for the first time in a while, saw my high school girlfriend's best friend across fifth avenue up in the slope but doidn't call out. Not sure why i didn't. There was a street fair that stretched a mile and a half down 7th avenue and on the steps of a church a group of people were singing "I'm Still In Love With You," which, even if you're Rev. Al himself, takes balls. Or ovaries. Or transgender equivalent thereof. I can think of at least three reggae covers of "Here I Am, Come and Take Me," offhand, if we include the crappy and barely qualifiable as reggae UB40 excrescence. Irma Thomas is awesome. In this land of strangers, there are dangers. My guitar sits across the room unstrummed. Jenny Reardon's Race to the Finish awaits. I am thinking about the intro to Moanin' - the Mingus tune not the better known Art Blakey composition. iTunes shuffle conjures up Sleater-Kinney's "Leave You Behind" from the album that made me love them, and that seems a good a place as any to end this entry and get back to work before the ADD renders this screed completely incomprehensible.

I wonder how you looked the day you were erased

Ferrets For Freedom

This is kind of awesome, but it doesn't convey the ferocity of Giuliani's response as the broadcast continued, nor the many other reasons why Giuliani's candidacy is deeply problematic (think Patrick Dorismond.)

Bill Moyers recently interviewed Grace Lee Boggs, the Brynn Mawr Philosophy PhD, Detroit radical, and compatriot of CLR James. At the close of the interview, Moyers asks GLB if she sees any contemporary leaders who are recognizing the limits of the political and embracing what GLB calls a moral and spiritual evolution and what anarchists call dual power. I am interested in Boggs' reply.

I think we have to rethink the concept of "leader." 'Cause "leader" implies "follower." ...I think we need to appropriate, embrace the idea that we are the leaders we've been looking for.

There are echoes here of the Wobblies at Everett, minus the suicidal solidarity of strikers surrounded at gunpoint by an army of scabs. But what interests me about this sentiment is thew way it seems ot go beyond the failures and gaps of dual power and embody an (egalitarian) ethic of organizing both in addition to and beyond the dropout politics of removing oneself from capitalism in order to construct alternatives to it (i.e., dual power.) "We are all leaders" presumably doesn't only mean "we lead ourselves," but also "we lead each other." Bring it.

Pete Rothberg at thenation.com calls the Employee Free Choice Act "redress for Taft-Hartley." If only this were the case. While the EFCA may make it easier for workers to decide whether they want to form unions, it does not even pretend to restore any of the tools and tactics that the act stripped. A numerical boost is a good thing, but it isn't necessarily enough to shift power relations between workers and bosses - though sometimes it can be, if deployed strategically. Which is to say that how much "redress," if any, the EFCA could provide if passed depends entirely on how far people are willing to push the envelope.

It's simply not true that Veronica Mars was consistently brilliant. Season one was engaging and engrossing and at times as good as anything else on TV, but season 2 was annoying and badly plotted, the final episode shocker was insulting and deeply problematic, and season 3 was similarly lame on both political and aesthetic grounds (which is not to suggest that the two are mutually independent or separable.) Rob Thomas was all too happy to let noir be a synonym for the male gaze, and the show's treatment of rape and sexual violence got progressively worse with each passing season. Supporting characters vanished into the ether, and plotlines became increasingly vapid, predictable, or pulled out of the writers' asses for lack of more compelling stories to tell. The "LoVe" story between Veronica and her borderline psychotic spoiled brat of a sometimes lover Logan Echols went from complicated, precarious, and smartly written, to lazy, faux-epic, and trite. So I'd be much more disturbed about the cancellation if the show I liked hadn't, for all intents and purposes, ended two years ago. One reads complaints on the internets about how the CW is replacing VM with a show starring the guy who played Oliver in what was certainly the worst story arc of the OC, but if season 4 was going to be of the same quality as seasons 2 and 3, I'm not sure it would have been worth making anyway. Thank god for The Wire.

Like Claudia Merson once said, "you're not helping."

This is a strong argument against charges made by critics of the Change To Win folks who see broad organizing strategy and structure as always antidemocratic and advocate for smaller scale autonomous unions. This also smacks of craft unionism, and, of course, gross incompetence. When your best shot is for another union to raid your shop, something's seriously wrong.

I was thinking about taking a break from the writing to head up to the free Booker T and the MG's/Sharon Jones show at Chambers Street and the Hudson river, which is also near where my grandparents live these days, but it was raining, and I stayed home instead. I'll pretend that the MGs didn't include Steve Cropper or Donald "Duck" Dunn as a not particularly effective means of consoling myself.

Postscript: Liminality Was So 2004 and Praeteritio, Furtim

I'm agnostic about the value of blogging at the moment, and I stand by this as a clearly articulated, if hastily written and sometimes poorly worded summation of much of what this blog has been/was. The tense confusion in the previous sentence evinces my ambivalence about resuming blogging, and I don't know that I will any time soon, but at the moment it is 1 in the morning, I have recently completed a paper on academic labor and intellectual formation, I learned recently that I'm TAing a large intro lecture next semester, a hole fell out of my tooth a couple weeks ago, and this showed up in my inbox today.



So I return here, not to offer not-particularly intelligent exposition on the recent ICE terror campaign against New Haven, or that "heartless hospital"'s never ending spiral of lies, harassment, and fear. Nor will i subject you to another legnthy reading of Buffy and the neoliberal university. I'll even spare you my take on Aaron Sorkin and white liberal masculinity, particularly as read in and through the incredibly crappy Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. (What? Kidnapping? Someone call Leo McGarry, wrong show be damned!) I won't talk (much) about family health crises and why an episode of Grey's Anatomy made me start spontaneously bawling a few weeks back. Nor will i ask you decide whether the Taste of Honey "Rescue Me" riff sampled by the Funky 4+1 on "The Joint" is better in its original disco form or more well known Sugar Hill incarnation.

I won't subject you to my constant inner monologue on NYU and my attempts to figure out how to reinvest myself in activism and organizing after last year's banal frustrations. And I don't want to get too emo and complainy about New York/aporia. Suffice to say that while we are taught to value the transverse and the rootlessly cosmopolitan, the migrant and the precarious - and rightly so, as sites of radical potential and transformative politics, I do not believe that yearnings for community are necessarily reactionary or recidivist. The fact that solidarity's contingent and imperiled doesn't make it any less valuable. I'm going to sleep now. Oh, Richard Levin will not be the next president of the world bank, so someone should warn Bud Selig. One has to wonder whether he was asked and said no, or whether someone thought Zoellick would be a more attractive candidate because he's less personally connected to the president. But Levin still gets that $42,000 a month pension as of next year, and 1800 hospital workers are still fighting for union recognition, and the world bank will continue to be the same baleful agent of privation, inequality and neoliberal fiscal disciplinarity. Woohoo. I'm going to sleep.