"This election is not about issues, This election is about a composite view of what people take away from these candidates" is the new ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

It's the "you smell like shoe polish" school of direct action.

"...how we do things downtown."

I'm late getting to this, but ROC-NY has won big in its years-long struggle against managerial tip-stealing and racism at Fireman restauraunts. This is a big deal because ROC-NY is one of the organizations at the forefront of the workers' center movement that was and remains so central to the immigrant worker labor movement that took the mainstream media and the streets of cities across the country by storm two years ago.

I haven't been blogging too much about what this blog purports to be about, mostly because it's summer break, I'm still in post-exam vacation mode, and watching massive amounts of Deadwood, which has, by my count, employed all seven of the words the late George Carlin told us could not be said on television, and then some. I have also watched a lot of movies, some on my ipod, some in the theatre. Be Kind Rewind and There Will Be Blood were the best of these, the former had me laughing uproariously at my computer screen at six in the morning, while the latter makes me want to go out and read the Upton Sinclair novel on which it's based. I'm interested in what Be Kind Rewind has to say about a politics of history - the history Mike and Jerry remake, the history of the films they 'swede' ("anything you say can and will be held against you in a court of robocop") but also the history of Passaic, New Jersey, of its great textile strike ("Passaic means class struggle") and of the projects into which Danny Glover's Mr. Fletcher is relocated at the film's close. Mia Farrow's character suggests a radical populism inherent to this postmodern selective/fictive reinterpretation of text and event, but the political possibilities of this kind of play, the film seems to suggest, are fleeting.

Iron Man was one of the better Marvel Comics movies, up there with the second Spider-Man film and maybe X2: X-Men United as the best of a bunch which includes the unwatchable Tom Jane Punisher remake (Dolph Lungren now keeping himself busy as a VH1 nostalgia show talking head), the execrable Daredevil, and its seque Elektra, whose existence escapes reason, as well as the crass Fantastic Four franchise. (Joel Schumacher Batman installments and Catwoman aside, DC's been much better at this sort of thing lately - Superman Returns was great, and while i didn't get much out of Batman Begins, it was certainly better than, say the Brett Ratner X-Men 3 crapfest.) When Iron Man came out back in May there was a great deal of hubbub about the critique of war profiteering and then backlash "it's not really a very strong critique" in response. The critique is somewhat limited, but even if Stain's double-dealing offers an easy way out of the conundrum, the film does highlight some interesting questions raised by corporate R&D and its relationship to the war state in an old-school, Eisenhower "Military Industrial Complex" manner (rather than a new school, Jeremy Scahill, labor subcontracting, Blackwater etc. one.) I do think that the ghostface killah cameo would have made more sense in this film than it does in Walk Hard, which I enjoyed mostly because of the 3 seconds of Martin Starr's Yiddish accent. Semi-Pro was pretty bad. Cloverfield was a boring landscape of gentrified, yuppie Manhattan in crisis. Charlie Wilson's War combined Aaron Sorkin's usual preachy liberalism with a worldview even more neocolonial than usual. Kung Fu Panda was OK. I like how they never explain why his father's a goose. No Country for Old Men was interesting. Breach was boring despite Chris Cooper, and Ryan Phillipe can't act. I don't remember what else I watched.

I've started walking again, and organizing again, and in general I'm enjoying being done with my exams and will soon move on to my incompletes and my dissertation proposal. Sigh.

random, but awesome.

random ten

Dino Perkins - "Skin Him Alive"

O.V. Wright, "Drowning on Dry Land."

The Four Mints. "You're My Desire"

Wu-Tang Clan Feat. Sunny Valentine & Tashmahogany, "Starter." from 8 Diagrams. I guess this is what people mean when they call this album "weird" or "psychadelic."

Journey - "any way you want it". Somewhere in my private corners of the internet i have a rewrite of this song ready to go, waiting for the right time. I haven't looked at it in almost two years though, and it's not as good as some of my other work. Anyway this song is not as good as, say, "Lights," or "Separate Ways (Worlds Apart,)" but it has a certain charm.

The Box Tops - "The Letter." Hard to believe that's Alex Chilton at like age 16.

The Chosen Few - "People Make The World Go Round" - one of at least three reggae covers I know of. This one's got crazy falsetto. I think I like Hortense Ellis's cover better. The backing vocals here are also a bit out of step with the song's meaning.

Swell Maps - "Robot Factory."

Weather Report - "Teen Town."

Miles Davis - "Bitches Brew."

Salt of the scholarly journal

The new American Quarterly, which just showed up in my mailbox, features on its covetr two images from the best movie ever, The Salt of the Earth (Revueltas's Esperanza in Jail and Chacon's Ramon blurred and out of focus,) and what looks to be a pretty interesting essay on the film by Benjamin Balthaser. Sweet.

So what, to my eyes, which are mostly ignorant of the particularities of Canadian Labor Law, seems like the Canadian equivalent of binding arbitration in the U.S., except the workers actually get to vote on whether or not to accept the proposed settlement, has produced a potential settlement to the T.A. strike at McGill, though again the union actually gets to vote on whether or not this is good enough to stop striking for. For what it's worth, the text on the AGSEM website seems guardedly optimistic

further adventures in sampling.

The Stylistics' "People Make The World Go Round."

Here's EPMD's "Ride the Bozack - one of two songs on the same LP to sample the Stylistics's original recording. (The other is "It Wasn't Me, It Was The Fame.")


Here's Hortense Ellis's great reggae version. Unfortunately the audio sucks. You can find it on iTunes with Hortense's brother Alton Ellis listed as the artist.



Okay. Here's Freddie Hubard's take.

and here's Pete Rock and C.L. Smooth's "Mecca and the Soul Brother", which samples the latter.

And there's Blackalicious's "Swan Lake," which samples the Hubbard as well as two other version not on youtube. (Milt Jackson and O'Donel Levy)



and here's Ramsey Lewis's rather lame smooth jazz version, which was apparently sampled by sage francis