I have recently come to believe that The Impressions' "Meeting Over Yonder" is among the most brilliant attempts at an overt linking of vernacular and popular musical forms and social movement organizing. What interests me and excites me about Mayfield's very simple, understated song - far moreseo than later work like "We're a Winner" and "This is my Country," let alone "(Don't Worry) If There's a Hell Below We're All Gonna Go" or "We Gotta Have Peace," is that it is a song that is about an organizing conversation - "hey, let's go to this meeting." That's basically the song. It's a song about an organizing conversation which is itself an organizing conversation. Not pedantic lecturing a la Dead Prez or "You Must Learn"-era BDP, just "After talking it out you all will agree that the best thing for you and me is going to the meeting over yonder." It's dialogic. And it participates in the kind of movement building it seeks to depict, and vice versa. (I wish I had a youtube clip, but there's only a video of Paul Weller's Style Council band covering it in 1984.)

Anyway I raise this because I just got back from Amherst and CGEU a couple of hours ago. It went well. Our panel on the lessons of the NYU fight was both too long and too short. I think my inexplicable migraine led me to gloss over things i wanted to stress. I hope we were still effective in communicating our message - on the way our understanding of whatr constitutes organbizing and how to do it has shifted radically since the contract expired, what role the strike played, what we;ve done since, and what the terrain on which we now organize looks like. There was a pretty interesting discussion of how contingent academic worker unions (the UAW jargon is "Academic Student Employee," which strikes me as a)redundant, b)a somewhat patronizing way to distinguish TAs, Research assistants, et alii from adjuncts and postdocs, and c)phonetically annoying like those ridiculous abbreviations everyone at stanford was throwing around when i visited in 12th grade. But that's really beside the point. I was struck this year by how many very, very good organizers there are in so many of the different unions that currently constitute the graduate (and undergraduate) employee labor movement, how important it is to create spaces to promote collective action and concerted strategies across unions and federations, how much potential there is in the movements of casualized academics to strike at the heart of the university-hospital-real estate-postindustrial complex and help chart a better future for schools, cities, and workers.

Phonebanking tomorrow. That and writing.

To get to Amherst, MA from NYC the quickest route involves taking 95 (or Hutch/Merritt/95) to New Haven and then getting on 91 for about 85 miles. Driving home I noticed the Montowese exit. This reminded me of driving back from the worst movie ever in Julie's Range Rover, when Alek for some reason decided to pronounce this supposedly native american name as one might pronounce a certain affectione sobriquet for the cash money millionaire lil' wayne. This in turn animated some vestigial feelings of fond resentment and lingering dissapointment that my friends actually wanted to see Wolfgang Peterson's two and a half hour neoclassical rape fantasy over Mean Girls, which, i will grant you, has problems of its own.

I just pulled a Josh.

NYU Colonizing Brooklyn Heights?

New York University is coming to Brooklyn — and so is its voracious appetite for real estate.

The fast-growing private institution, based in Greenwich Village, is opening its first non-Manhattan residence in a Brooklyn Heights apartment tower, and is negotiating what it described as a “merger” with Downtown Brooklyn-based Polytechnic University.

The Brooklyn Paper has learned that 115 graduate students plan to move this month into the “sliver building” at 67 Livingston St., between Clinton and Court streets. The building was formerly used as a residence hall by the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society.

The dormitory news follows a statement by NYU earlier this week that it is negotiation a merger with Downtown Brooklyn–based Polytechnic University.

NYU spokesman John Beckman said in a written statement that his school has been “looking across to Brooklyn to spread the tentacles of its ever growing physical campus.”

Is this a joke? Did Beckman actually say "tentacles?"

A Tornado Grows In Brooklyn

This morning, a tornado hit my neighborhood and Bay Ridge just to the south of us, and did some serious damage down there. My block was unscathed, but the area most badly hit is only about a mile from my apartment. I had a post up about the tornado drills they used to make me do in elementary school and the disaster that eventually struck my high school on April 4, 1991, which had nothing to do with tornados, but it was off topic, and, while I'd moved away a year before it happened, traumatic enough for folks i grew up with that i thought better of detailing it without justification, so I scrapped it.

The only other time I have been near a tornado was on the 4th of July, 1998, in eastern Montana. I was doing this frustratingly bourgie and colonialist "build a playground on an Indian reservation" thing and we had gone to some town where there were fireworks and loud 70's and 80's rock (i.e. "R.O.C.K. in the U.S.A." We could see the storm coming and we thought we were going to be hit, but then it turned around and went the other way. I think there was a Dairy Queen involved. My otherwise eidetic memory seems to be failing me.

Dentist tomorrow, then CGEU this weekend, and then marathon paper writing, take N.

David Brooks:

"For the past few decades, the White House has been occupied by George, William, George, Ronald, James and Richard. Those pillars are crumbling. Pluralism is here."

You say pluralism, I say nepotism...?

Madness and Civilization

Madness gets slammed by folks for not having the same level of commitment to antiracist politics as the other 2tone bands. They were the only all-white 2tone band, and they were never really down with Rock Against Racism - indeed they never really repudiated the neo-nazi element of their fandom, despite their Prince Buster covers and encomia. We should find that extremely problematic in the context of the political climate of Ska's so-called "second wave." Paul Gilroy certainly does in There Ain't No Black In The Union Jack. This video is certainly "not helping" a la Claudia Merson to TWF and yours truly Summer 2003, in that this is not a particularly critical interrogation of the imagoinary of British colonialism. I'd love to read the salutes and hatstomping and the dead bassist (wtf) as a subtle politics of anti/post/colonial mimicry, but I don't think that reading works or is responsible, acknowledges the silences of the green screen and those beyond it.

Bonus: someone say something about the gender and class politics of the multip,e forms of drag being performed here. (Also, we can just talk about how great this video is.)

Although my favorite may actually be

IHT: "Company accused of abducting Filipinos to build U.S. Embassy in Iraq"

MANILA: The Filipinos thought they were flying to Dubai. One of them told a fellow passenger how excited he was about his new job as a telephone repairman at a hotel in the emirate.

It was only after liftoff from Kuwait, when the captain made an announcement, that they learned their destination was, in fact, Baghdad.

"All you-know-what broke loose on that airplane. People started shouting," said Rory Mayberry, an American passenger on the flight who had been hired to work in the Iraqi capital.

The Filipinos settled down only after a security guard from the company that had hired them waved a submachine gun, according to Mayberry. "They realized they had no other choice but to go to Baghdad," he said.

Now that's what I call Enduring Freedom!

Apologies for the parade of Youtube clips, but I'm too busy/inert for anything more at the moment.

I don't dislike Lilly Allen, but when Alright Still first started getting reviewed in the states and people kept dropping The Specials as a clear influence, I didn't get it. Was it just because she was a white british kid making Jamaican-influenced music? Given the abscence of a two-tone politics in her work, wouldn't Madness have been the more appropriate referent? Anyway here's Allen doing the Specials' Prince Buster-soaked "Gangsters" with Terry Hall and Lynval Golding, the lead singer and rhythm guitarist of said band. Hall looks and sounds pretty good, given that this (starts about 40 seconds in) was thirty years ago, and Allen is sufficiently reverential/deferential. I really don't have anything more interesting to say than that i think this is kinda cool.