I am 26 years old, as of yesterday. This frightens me. It frightens me because I often feel as if I have wasted much of the past three years, like this recent tendency to fall into things, to let life happen to me, as certain individuals for whom i hold profound respect put it in a rather intense little meeting almost a year and a half ago - more intense than any conversation i've had since i stopped organizing undergraduates - has rendered me increasingly useless academically, personally, and "politically," for lack of a better schema. It's doubtless not very productive to castigate myself publicly on the internet, and there's a school of thought, or a portion of my brain, to be a little less grandiose, which holds that every time i do i'm really just giving myself permission to decide that resistance is futile and slip into a complacent self loathing, or self loathing complacence. So suffice to say that I am neither particularly productive as an organizer or academic nor particularly happy as a human being, and these are all inseparable, and I need to so something about this. Working this out is my project for the rest of the summer - finishing my papers, doing everything i can to build the organizing, and trying to figure my life out. I don't want to be typing some more frenetic, desparate, or depressing analogue of these words in a year's time. The thought of getting older but not better terrifies me. And that sentence sounds so psychobabbly that i'm ashamed to have written it. I think being able to admit this to myself is a good thing, though.

I had a mildly humiliating evening, which consisted of being turned away from the bar i was trying to get inside for a friend's goodbye party due to lack of ID, and then having to sprint after the B63 from Garfield to like 6th street trying to get the bus home. The whole endeavor felt futile and embarrassing. But the evening was kind of saved by what i saw staring into the cemetery, waiting fro the bus to take me up to park slope before the comedy of errors started - fireflies, everywhere. I am fascinated by fireflies, both because bioluminescence is itself pretty amazing and because they signify something that i think Joss Whedon was all too aware of - that is, hope, and specifically perhaps the miraculous randomness of hope, its fragility but also its irrepressability and its ubiquity. By their very presence, the fireflies seemed to transform the cemetery - which has a certain ancient beauty to it, into something vibrant and otherworldly. I'll shut up about this now.

My two favorite Wilson Pickett songs are songs i first heard as covers by the Adjusters, "Mini-skirt Minnie" and "Toe Hold." They are both very good covers, but the originals are fantastic and you should check them out if you aren't familiar with them.

edit: this is pretty cool too.

Here's some of that hard-hitting, investigative journalism that Rupert Murdoch wants to do away with. Gotta love the witty interjection from the anti-union NYU prof...

I picked up this great Bettye Swann compilation from other music a few weeks ago. I was reading the liner notes today and the compiler talks about trying to track Swann down and how she dodged his questions and walked away from her music career because of "really rough times." The whole narrative seems to remove agency in the creative process from Swann and place it in the hands of this dude trying to track her down, trying to unearth her work, trying to restore her music/name to never-realized former glories a la British orientalism (Jones et al.) (sorry, still rereading Said.) All of which, aside from being politically problematic around issues of representation and the racialized logics of creative labor and intellectual property, also begs the question - is she actually being paid for any of this? If this person can't even really locate her, how is she getting a check?

I think part of my ambivalence about finding a new place comes from the fact that the move i really want to make right now is to another city and possibly another profession, but i'm not doing any of those at the moment, and instead i just kinda sit around and try to write and passivley wait for the future to happen against the prescient advice two of the best organizers i have ever met gave me almost a year and a half ago.

I should follow by clarifying that my desire ot leave new york stems not from the sort of "been there done that" cum "New York is mean and overbearing and i make millions writing bad songs about how alienated i feel" B.S. for which i have pilloried certain sectors of the Indie Rock establishment. I appreciate and am thankful that New York is bigger than, more than, North Square and North Six, Theory and Anthropologie and etc. I just want to be somewhere else.

Meanwhile the increasing numbers of young white folks moving into sunset park seem to be hailing from increasingly elevated income brackets and wearing increasingly hip clothing, and i'm totally complicit in this, and i',m frustrated that my only contribution to this neighborhood in the years i've lived here seems to have been as a pioneer for successive waves of gentrification.

Anyway, speaking of hipsters, i am excited about the new New Pornographers CD. Ah NAFIJWA, you hypocrite. I wonder if anonymity has run its course. I'll be 26 on tuesday and I feel like I am wasting too much time not particularly productively moving towards a profession i don't know that i want to enter. At the very least I wonder if I shouldn't have waited several more years to start grad school, and as counterproductive as this sort of speculation is it's also pretty addictive.

So I turn to "Becoming Part 2," specifically the scene in which Angel/us is about to kill Buffy, and taunts her by telling her that she has "no weapons, no friends, no hope," and then asks her, mockingly, what is left as he thrusts his sword at her neck (phallic much?) She says "me." stops the blade with her hands and breaks it in two. Of course, then he gets his sould back and hse has to kill him anyway to stop the world from being sucked into hell, so maybe that's not the best place to look for inspiration. Or maybe the point is that shit is hard, and you have to do things that are extremely difficult and gut wrenching, and you have to do them and move forward anyway and then you have to deal with the consequences. Alright, the ADD's kicked in, I'm babbling about Buffy, and somewhere between the first and fourth paragraphs this got way too emo, so i'll have mercy on you, dear reader, (apostrophe!) and end it here.

The symbolism is rich indeed,

Symbolically opening a pair of doors on Washington Square East that had been locked for 10 years, New York University welcomed neighborhood residents into its Hemmerdinger Hall last Thursday for an open house on its new strategic planning initiative.

“Nobody can remember the last time those doors were open,” said John Beckman, the university’s spokesperson. “The people in Lori Mazor’s group felt it was important to open them.”

The custodial staff didn’t have the key, however, so N.Y.U. had to call a locksmith to open the entrance.

but the model for "community involvement" still seems rather impoverished, too dependent on Sexton's megalomaniacal "i want you to love me" bloviating (as opposed to his "I will crush you into submission" bloviating, which he also does) and with no attempt to engage any "community" beyond presumably very wealthy residents of the west village. When NYU starts negotiating with FIERCE, I'll be impressed.

Also, Toshiko Mori doesn't like Bobst or Kimmel.

“Kimmel Student Center is a disaster,” she said, wrinkling her nose in distaste. “Bobst is quite foreboding. There’s something ominous about it. It’s one thing to be monumental, but there’s something sinister about it. It doesn’t reflect what N.Y.U. today is — which is very urban, engaged with the community and active, accessible. Of course, Bobst is way too big for the space, and urbanistically you have to take into account Washington Square — which, next to it, makes it double [in terms of Bobst’s inappropriately large size]. Gould Plaza is desolate.”

I'm less disgusted by the scale than I am the emptiness of both buildings. Bobst has relatively few books - it's mostly open space and panoptical windows and administrative offices. Kimmel as a student space leaves something to be desired, mired in overwhelming levels of bureaucracy and always existing in the context of the privatization of a broader set of public uses for Washington Square park and Greenwhich village which may at this point be long gone. That said, we;re in agreement over the 12th street dorm

Also, weren''t those supposedly never-open doors open for a) this and b) this? What does it say about a new era of openness and community participation when they are apparently lying through their teeth from the get-go?

Also, the cops can still search you in the subway and the government can still illegally wiretap you

This blog would like to thank the following cultural texts:

1. The Soul Jazz records compilation The Sound of Philadelphia - Funk, Soul and the roots of Disco 1965-1973: Philadelphia Roots Volume 2 and Chairman Palm for introducing me to The Three Degrees' "Collage," which is a pretty amazing song.

2. The Freda Payne antiwar song "Bring the Boys Home," which we should understand as a strategic gesture, not only a masculinist failure.

3. Pat Benatar's "Hell Is For Children," the most uncomfortably anthemic song about child abuse until Soul Asylum dropped "Runaway Train."

4. The original transformers movie, with Eric Idle as an anarchist junkyard robot and Orson Welles! as an evil robot planet bent on destruction and t.error. Replete with awesome cheesy 80's music including Weird Al Yankovic back when he still had a moustache.

5. Intermission, the recent 2-disc greatest hits compilation of the respective solo careers of Grant Mclennan and the late, great Robert Forster, the creative team behind the Go-Betweens. I didn't even realize they'd had solo careers after the Go-Betweens broke up in the late 80's and then reformed in 2000, but there is some great stuff here.

6. Orientalism. (to which I now return.)

The times reports that a judge wants an investigation of possible collusion between Columbia University and the Empire State Development Corporation, a state agency that finances higher education real estate projects. Columbia and the ESDC are using the same consultant in "determining" whether to proceed with a possible eminent domain landgrab of west Harlem for Columbia's much ballyhooed science campus expansion.

If the ESDC is colluding with Columbia, where else is it showing such deference to neoliberal universities' gentrification agendas over the concerns of local communities and organizations? The ESDC provides substantial financial incentives to universities. Maybe this all needs significantly greater scrutiny...

Meanwhile, John Sexton tries to assuage community fears over NYU expansion. I blogged about this last week, but what strikes me about Karen Arenson's piece is how incomplete any dialogue that only includes 300 "community members" can be, and the necessarily overdetermined place of the Nadler-Quinn task force in keeping NYU honest. Won't work. Not by itself. What will change the way NYU interacts with not only the long since gentrified neighblorhoods around it, but also the rest of the city and the state and region, is a strong, dynamic movement for social justice from the ground up, which links folks working on campus and around the city. This isn't possible without GSOC, without strong campus labor movements constantly pushing and transforming the university. And I don't think academic labor movements can ever win unless we adopt tactics like these.