i read the news today, (oh boy.)

When I hear the names Cheryl Mills and Jacob Lew, "Left Wing Ideology" is not what immediately comes to mind.

Also, re: final paragraph, apparently, the passive voice is a technocrat's best friend

Long time readers of this blog (not sure if that actually exists at this point, since i've dissapeared and returned so often i think people have forgotten this is here) may recall a fascination I have with songs about phone numbers. But i guess I've been thinking more recently about songs about telecommunication more broadly, and I'm struck in particular about songs about telecommunication's failure. A lot of these songs seem to come from Minneapolis for some reason. There's Soul Asylum's "Somebody to Shove," which I guess doesn't really count, because it's sanguine about the actual phone call, just frustrated by having to wait for it. The song itself feels now trite, too immersed in early 1990s para-grunge pop, Dave Pirner too ensconced in his penchant for elaborate but hollow rhymes ("a world frozen over with over exposure," etc.
) But the song that prompted this post is The Replacements' "Answering Machine." Here's a crappy live video of Paul Westerberg performing the song drunk during the band's twilight years,(and here's a decent cover i found on youtube.)Westerberg is a far more inventive and adventurous songwriter than Pirner, but let's leave aesthetic (or reified aesthetic) judgements behind for the moment. What i find gripping about this song is the melancholy resignation to the simultaneous indispensability and complete insufficiency of the answering machine, of canned, recorded voices and telephonic absences. What I find infuriating about the song is the racist and sexist assumptions based on the analogy which suggests that saying "I miss you" to an answering machine is as futile (or at least, as difficult) as if one should "try to free a slave of ignorance" or "try to teach a whore about romance." This suggests that Paul Westerberg doesn't know very much about slavery ("picking cotton and waiting to be forgotten" (from "Bastards of Young" pisses me off for similar reasons) and that his hopeless drunken romanticism bears a rather problematic relationship to the gendered service work performed not only by sex workers, but also by the "Waitress in the sky" he'd go on to mock on the next album. Is it that the whore cannot be "taught" about romance, or that it is in her labor that the ideological limits (and violence) of the construction of heterosexual romance become legible?

I'd be remiss too if I failed to mention Sheena Easton's "Telephone," and Easton's from Scottland, not Minnesota.


And then there's the Wowz's "LDL," a beautiful stripped down version of which (sans John Dydo) is embedded below.


And oh yeah, there's Blondie's cover of "Hanging on the Telephone"


And X's "Your Phone's off the hook, but you're not."

Unite HERE to endorse Obama?

That's what Steven Greenhouse is reporting. Assuming it's true, and he's a pretty good reporter, so why wouldn't it be, that has to spell certain doom for Edwards.

I'd like to see Obama privilege labor rights and justice in the same way Edwards has. I'd like to see him renounce his vote on the border fence and commit to working for immigrant justice. I'd like to see him stand up for something instead of repeating the same flowery rhetoric about hope and audacity and other empty signifiers. Right wingers and white liberals alike are taking great pleasure in noting the many ways in which Obama is not Jesse Jackson, butJackson's coalition in the 80's was an important model for broad based, multi-issue, progressive, anti-racist organizing, and wouldn't it be something if all this "Obamania" would direct itself somewhere similarly productive instead of the rather shapeless cult of personality which it sometimes resembles these days?

Whose Streets?

There's an interesting article in today's times about the competing visions of urban 'redevelopment' held by Yale University and the New Haven mayor's office. The article oversimplifies and/or glosses over Yale's very particular investments in gentrifying and expanding into certain areas on its immediate periphery, neglects to mention the univerities own role in creating the Route 34 connector (see Gordon Lafer's 2002 "Land and Labor in the postindustrial university town: remaking social geography" in the journal Political Geography,) and with the exception to a passage about "low income" New Haveners' calls to rebuild an affordable neighborhood where now rests the Route 34 dustbowl, the voices of working class New Haven residents are completely absent from the piece, silenced despite or perhaps because of how vocal and organized they have been over the last half century to demand a different vision for their city which disrupts the kinds of technocratic teleologies offered here.

Particularly striking, too, was this quote from Karen Gilvarg:

“The streets of their campus are the streets of the city,” Ms. Gilvarg, the city planner, said. “They are part of the public infrastructure, not private roads.”

This is of course not true. In exchange for payments to the city's fire and police departments, widely believed to be insufficient, New Haven, under the Daniels administration, in a deal managed in part by Yale School of Management professor Douglas Rae, sold two of those streets, Wall and a chunk of High Street (aka "Rose Walk") to the university in the early 1990s. Scraps of an already dwindling commons were sold to a very wealth university for a pittance by one of that university's loudest boosters, on temporary leave to work in the office of the city's first black mayor.

In 2005, under pressure from the citywide movement for a "new social contract" led by the Connecticut Center for a New Economy, the university nearly doubled its payments to the city in lieu of taxes, although, as members of the student Fair Share Coalition said at the time, this was not enough.

"This demonstrates the importance of ongoing pressure from students and the community," Eidelson said. "We continue to believe Yale should make up the full difference between the [Payment in Lieu of Taxes] payments New Haven receives from the state and the tax value of the University."

The question that's largely absent from this article, which of course appears in the Business section, is how working class New Haven will make itself heard, will intervene in the intertwined and competing designs on the city's future the article discusses, whether the city will keep on incubating biotech (and yuppies) or whether the same movements that fought for and won the 2005 increase will keep struggling for a very different vision of a socially just city.

Jingoist Zombies for Thompson!

That's from the Boston Globe, posted here at Thomas's request.

Looks like Obama won. I'll take my fascist wall at the border with extra spikes.

ok, now that i got through a relatively long post of substance, i can get back to dumping music on you.

Try this
(The dB's - "Living a Lie")

Hard to believe that Peter Holsapple had that much blonde hair.

Woody Guthrie - "Lindbergh"
One of my favorite Guthrie tunes. I feel like Phillip Roth owes Arlo some royalties.


Joe Bataan - "Mestizo"
I really should have assigned this to my students last semester.

Every Day and Night/I'm Out of Fucking Time

Le Tigre reference in the title. Ok.

I usually do a year end post at the end of every year. Here, here, here, here/here, if you're interested, in chronological order from 2003 to 2006. And there's a bonus one here. And see my attempt at narrating how i learned to stop worrying and organize. And qualification on said attempt.

This year I'm somewhat tempted to just throw a link here - one of my favorite posts from the last year, and indeed the last four, and a post which i think suggests what animates this blog at its best - a dedication to a global politics of intellectual labor and anticapitalism towards a collective reinvention of the city as a space of social justice and for the transformation of the university from neoliberal profit machine, difference engine, and labor exploiter to a liberated, just endeavor and project. That entry above emerged at a particularly nebulous point in my grad school career and in GSOC's continuing struggle. And i don't know how successful I've been in the intervening months in working towards the goals i lay out. This is no place to air dirty laundry of GSOC strategies, but suffice to say that we have our work cut out for us, and it will not be easy.

I fantasized about dropping out at regular intervals. Like yesterday, hanging out with Josh in Park Slope. I think about going back to Unite-HERE all the time, if they'd take me. My dad had open heart surgery in April. He's doing pretty good these days. I stared at a lot of computer screens. I became a 'preceptor' and went into massive credit card debt. Marna Borgstrom and Vin Petrini made Joe Zaccagnino proud. I passed an exam. The writers went on strike.


It's been a strange year. It picked up towards the end.