Students at the London School of Economics join colleagues at SOAS (and are now joined by folks at Essex University) in building occupations protesting university investments in arms manufacturers involved in Israel's attacks against the Palestinians in Gaza, demanding that their university issue a statement in support of the people of Gaza and undertake humanitarian efforts. More here.
That's four posts in five days. What is this, 2005?
Friday, January 16, 2009
A goose in every engine
As promised, this week's shuffle
Makonde - Manzara
Charlie Parker - Chasing The Bird
Nas - America
James Brown - Down and Out in New York City
Kool Blues - I'm Gonna Keep On Loving You
Charles Mingus - Los Mariachis
Eric (Showboy) Akaeze and His Royal Ericos - Wetin De Watch Goat, Goat Dey Watcham
Black Flag - Police Story.
Spoon - All The Pretty Girls Go To The City
A Tribe Called Quest - Verses From The Abstract
So we get the chocolate city, the deindustrialized city, New York in the early 70s, on the one hand, and we get postcolonial Lagos, we get Q-tip's Queens of 1991 and Nas's "America" 17 years later, and we get Spoon channeling Edwyn Collins and singing about the city as destination, the neoliberal hipster amusement park city. My ipod is trying to tell me things.
Makonde - Manzara
Charlie Parker - Chasing The Bird
Nas - America
James Brown - Down and Out in New York City
Kool Blues - I'm Gonna Keep On Loving You
Charles Mingus - Los Mariachis
Eric (Showboy) Akaeze and His Royal Ericos - Wetin De Watch Goat, Goat Dey Watcham
Black Flag - Police Story.
Spoon - All The Pretty Girls Go To The City
A Tribe Called Quest - Verses From The Abstract
So we get the chocolate city, the deindustrialized city, New York in the early 70s, on the one hand, and we get postcolonial Lagos, we get Q-tip's Queens of 1991 and Nas's "America" 17 years later, and we get Spoon channeling Edwyn Collins and singing about the city as destination, the neoliberal hipster amusement park city. My ipod is trying to tell me things.
Thursday, January 15, 2009
This is going to be one of those semi-narcissistic blog entries about me in which i try to work in stuff about the rest of the world too. I'm mostly kidding with the disclaimer. I don't think i'm much of a narcissist. You may disagree, of course.
Incomplete number two is about three pages or so from being done. I will finish it tomorrow, i think, then work on my diss proposal for a day or two, then start the final incomplete, which is, i think, going to be a review essay on race and financialization. It was originally going to be about the Birmingham School's race analysis, and maybe i'll decide to go back to that instead. I feel like the financialization stuff is important for understanding the past year and would be an excuse to read Christian Marazzi's Capital and Language, Ian Baucom's SPecters of the Atlantic, and Randy Martin's recent stuff, all of which could be useful for my project(s) broadly concieved.
I spent the majority of "break" in the library, researching, writing or trying to. Bobst is slightly more tolerable when it's less populated, but its fascist (literally, i learned last night) architecture has always unnerved me, far more so than SML's imperialist cathedral to orientalist and colonialist knowledges, say, or the fact that the NYPL was in Ghostbusters and Slimer could phase through that wall at any second, and then, i mean, who ya gonna call? Someone said recently that I reminded them of Jeanine. Not Louis, Jeanine.
Still, there's a feeling of satisfaction on the one hand in vold in making headway on this crap that's been hanging over my head for so long - like i'm actually getting stuff done, mixed with fear, because the papers are going to suck, because now i actually have to be evaluated on this stuff, because what now, because i don't want to be a professor if that means this. (Not to say that i don't respect the hard decisions folks had to make, but if hotel workers ask you to boycott the hotel you boycott the hotel. End of story. Whatever the problematic politics of the same sex marriage movement when they're making alliances with immigrant service worker unions and the American Historical Association fails to stand with them, that is a sad day. Anyway.) I'm also feeling stressed out, because this is taking so long, because I have so much to do this senmester, and because my Plato is rusty - i just remember there's that dude named Kephalos, which means "head" in Greek. I found this funny in high school, not for prurient reasons - get your head out of the gutter, nonexistent reader! More because of the absurdity, maybe the irony of a philosopher or philosopher's consilgliere named "Mr. Head." Also it sounded like the sock puppet from south park which i had not yet fully repudiated then. It's hard to recognize something as libertarian when they're mocking Atlas Shrugged and you're fifteen. Or sixteen. I guess i was sixteen. I'd contextualize the Plato remark, but this is the interwebs and google can come back to hurt your favorite alderpeople.
Still no cease fire in Gaza, no contract in chicago, (and we don't want no peace, we want equal rights and justice.)
At some point in the soonish future i want to write something about Moore and Gibbons' Watchmen before they turn it into a really shitty movie in which the writer has no stake (having forsaken it in protest of DC Comics' refusal to let the copyright revert to him.) And at some point i should really resume critical analyses of the university. Let's start with this.
Back to work for a bit, then sleep, then more work.
EDIT: forgot this last week, and i'll do another tomorrowish
Marnie Stern: Healer
Wally Cox + The Natives: House Party. rare funk track from california. Lot of hammond.
Charlie Parker - Donna Lee
Joe Lovano and Greg Osby - Truth Be Told sadly hadn't listened to this since high school
Mirah -- Exactly Where We're From. Isn't she from like Wynnewood or Bala Cynwyd?
Darkness - Gamith
Run DMC - Hollis Crew. they are going in the rock and roll hall of fame with metallica. They should team up for the black tracksuit album.
Specials - Blank Expression.
De la Soul - Supa Emcees
The Monks - Complication. This song is ridiculous.
Incomplete number two is about three pages or so from being done. I will finish it tomorrow, i think, then work on my diss proposal for a day or two, then start the final incomplete, which is, i think, going to be a review essay on race and financialization. It was originally going to be about the Birmingham School's race analysis, and maybe i'll decide to go back to that instead. I feel like the financialization stuff is important for understanding the past year and would be an excuse to read Christian Marazzi's Capital and Language, Ian Baucom's SPecters of the Atlantic, and Randy Martin's recent stuff, all of which could be useful for my project(s) broadly concieved.
I spent the majority of "break" in the library, researching, writing or trying to. Bobst is slightly more tolerable when it's less populated, but its fascist (literally, i learned last night) architecture has always unnerved me, far more so than SML's imperialist cathedral to orientalist and colonialist knowledges, say, or the fact that the NYPL was in Ghostbusters and Slimer could phase through that wall at any second, and then, i mean, who ya gonna call? Someone said recently that I reminded them of Jeanine. Not Louis, Jeanine.
Still, there's a feeling of satisfaction on the one hand in vold in making headway on this crap that's been hanging over my head for so long - like i'm actually getting stuff done, mixed with fear, because the papers are going to suck, because now i actually have to be evaluated on this stuff, because what now, because i don't want to be a professor if that means this. (Not to say that i don't respect the hard decisions folks had to make, but if hotel workers ask you to boycott the hotel you boycott the hotel. End of story. Whatever the problematic politics of the same sex marriage movement when they're making alliances with immigrant service worker unions and the American Historical Association fails to stand with them, that is a sad day. Anyway.) I'm also feeling stressed out, because this is taking so long, because I have so much to do this senmester, and because my Plato is rusty - i just remember there's that dude named Kephalos, which means "head" in Greek. I found this funny in high school, not for prurient reasons - get your head out of the gutter, nonexistent reader! More because of the absurdity, maybe the irony of a philosopher or philosopher's consilgliere named "Mr. Head." Also it sounded like the sock puppet from south park which i had not yet fully repudiated then. It's hard to recognize something as libertarian when they're mocking Atlas Shrugged and you're fifteen. Or sixteen. I guess i was sixteen. I'd contextualize the Plato remark, but this is the interwebs and google can come back to hurt your favorite alderpeople.
Still no cease fire in Gaza, no contract in chicago, (and we don't want no peace, we want equal rights and justice.)
At some point in the soonish future i want to write something about Moore and Gibbons' Watchmen before they turn it into a really shitty movie in which the writer has no stake (having forsaken it in protest of DC Comics' refusal to let the copyright revert to him.) And at some point i should really resume critical analyses of the university. Let's start with this.
Back to work for a bit, then sleep, then more work.
EDIT: forgot this last week, and i'll do another tomorrowish
Marnie Stern: Healer
Wally Cox + The Natives: House Party. rare funk track from california. Lot of hammond.
Charlie Parker - Donna Lee
Joe Lovano and Greg Osby - Truth Be Told sadly hadn't listened to this since high school
Mirah -- Exactly Where We're From. Isn't she from like Wynnewood or Bala Cynwyd?
Darkness - Gamith
Run DMC - Hollis Crew. they are going in the rock and roll hall of fame with metallica. They should team up for the black tracksuit album.
Specials - Blank Expression.
De la Soul - Supa Emcees
The Monks - Complication. This song is ridiculous.
Sunday, January 11, 2009
conrecerca
I'm sitting in the panopticon - which I'm lately starting to think about as the Great Gatsby of academic libraries, its massive empty space (and dearth of books) in the middle of space-starved downtown manhattan as equivalent to Gatsby's shelves of unread volumes, as conspicuous consumption transitions to conspicuous waste.
Anyway I'm trying to finish one of two remaining incompletes, on Gramsci's "Americanism and Fordism," and i'm about three pages in.
On the subway in from Brooklyn, i read Nick Dyer-Witheford's peice on class composition and multitude theory in Werner Bonefeld's new Subverting the Present, Imagining the Future, (Autonomedia 2008) which Andy hipped me to (did i just say "hipped me to?" This is what happens when you go to grad school. You forget how to speak/write/think because you're so anxious about the academy's pathological, reactionary politics of value and unspoken - at least in public - ethics of competition.) It's a really smart and useful attempt to evaluate the critiques of Hardt and Negri from other autonomists, to think about the utility of the multitude concept in a modified form, and to suggest and highlight forms of inquiry and analysis which proceed from such a utility, like Precarias a la Deriva and Collectivo Situaciones. It's a really useful, synthesis, as so much of Dyer-Witheford's tend to be. I'm already thinking about how to integrate some of the insights into my diss proposal.
Anyway I'm trying to finish one of two remaining incompletes, on Gramsci's "Americanism and Fordism," and i'm about three pages in.
On the subway in from Brooklyn, i read Nick Dyer-Witheford's peice on class composition and multitude theory in Werner Bonefeld's new Subverting the Present, Imagining the Future, (Autonomedia 2008) which Andy hipped me to (did i just say "hipped me to?" This is what happens when you go to grad school. You forget how to speak/write/think because you're so anxious about the academy's pathological, reactionary politics of value and unspoken - at least in public - ethics of competition.) It's a really smart and useful attempt to evaluate the critiques of Hardt and Negri from other autonomists, to think about the utility of the multitude concept in a modified form, and to suggest and highlight forms of inquiry and analysis which proceed from such a utility, like Precarias a la Deriva and Collectivo Situaciones. It's a really useful, synthesis, as so much of Dyer-Witheford's tend to be. I'm already thinking about how to integrate some of the insights into my diss proposal.
Thursday, January 8, 2009
clarification
My problem with an academic boycott is entirely tactical. I think it's useless and i think student movements and yes even faculty associations can intervene in ways that are way more direct and way more powerful. I think that even when their are caveats (e.g., "unless they reject the invasion of Gaza") it looks fishy, it ascribes the actions of the state on to the bodies of the citizen in a way that winds up reproducing Zionist logics, and it doesn't really attack in any way the policies or forces against which folks are trying to organize against.
If you've got an argument for why a boycott against Israeli academics makes strategic/tactical sense, I'd love to hear it.
If you've got an argument for why a boycott against Israeli academics makes strategic/tactical sense, I'd love to hear it.
Zach divests from Israel
I divested from Israel this week. I didn't actually know i was invested in Israel until a couple of days ago. My great-grandmother, who died in 1987 (when I was six years old) apparently took out a bond in my name with the state of Israel which matured about thirteen years ago. My great grandmother never told anyone about this bond, in all likelihood because she had Alzheimer's when she bought the bond, and her symptoms only intensified in the last six years of her life. This meant that I never really knew her. It also meant that nobody knew that this bond existed until my dad found it, going through his grandmother's papers last week. (My dad's side of the family were suburban Philly republicans, the right wing branch of the family, at least compared to the anarchists and bundist/communists on my mother's side.)
I promptly sent the bond in to be cashed (apparently you can do this by mail.) I have doubts about the efficacy of, say, boycotting Israeli academics, but I'm staunchly anti-zionist and the thought that my name and my family have been wrapped up in the occupation of the West Bank and the brutal state terrorism in the Gaza strip sickens me. So, IDF, consider my personal divestment from your repressive and ideological state apparatuses long overdue, and a gesture of solidarity, however small, with Palestinians, Israelis, and other Jews fighting for social justice in the middle east and all over the world.
I promptly sent the bond in to be cashed (apparently you can do this by mail.) I have doubts about the efficacy of, say, boycotting Israeli academics, but I'm staunchly anti-zionist and the thought that my name and my family have been wrapped up in the occupation of the West Bank and the brutal state terrorism in the Gaza strip sickens me. So, IDF, consider my personal divestment from your repressive and ideological state apparatuses long overdue, and a gesture of solidarity, however small, with Palestinians, Israelis, and other Jews fighting for social justice in the middle east and all over the world.
Friday, January 2, 2009
I tried writing a year end post on the subway on wednesday night shuttling back and forth btw manhattan and brooklyn so i could go into the city then back to my apt then back to the city because i forgot my ID to get into a bar/club i had no desire to go to, because I don't drink and i don't like crowded clubs on new years where drunk people I don't know elbow me. Anyway it wasn't a productive excercise, and I'm too busy at the moment to give such an endeavor the attention it would command of me.
Anyway, I (re-sort of)read "The Power of Women and The Subversion of The Community" yesterday, and today, I'm going to walk into the city and read a lot of Gramsci.
Two quick links on universities and debt. David Swensen is buying it up and a university near you is making deals with credit cards to profit from students', alumni, and workers' financial insecurity.
random ten
I put my ipod on shuffle and this is what it played.
Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers - Moanin'
Super Rail Band - Maliyo (From Rail Band vol 1. This is really great.)
Fela Kuti - ODOO
Toots and The Maytals - Careless Ethiopians
Edd Henry - Your Replacement Is Here
Desmond Dekker - Big Headed
Vic's Pick - Damaged (From the Version City compilation. Late '90s NYC dub.)
MIA - Pull Up The People
Woody Guthrie - I Ain't Got No Home
Beck - Dead Melodies. I thought this album was really great in 1998. Now I am not so sure, which probably has a lot to do with the whole scientology thing and everything isnce Midnight Vultures being exceedingly boring.
Anyway, I (re-sort of)read "The Power of Women and The Subversion of The Community" yesterday, and today, I'm going to walk into the city and read a lot of Gramsci.
Two quick links on universities and debt. David Swensen is buying it up and a university near you is making deals with credit cards to profit from students', alumni, and workers' financial insecurity.
random ten
I put my ipod on shuffle and this is what it played.
Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers - Moanin'
Super Rail Band - Maliyo (From Rail Band vol 1. This is really great.)
Fela Kuti - ODOO
Toots and The Maytals - Careless Ethiopians
Edd Henry - Your Replacement Is Here
Desmond Dekker - Big Headed
Vic's Pick - Damaged (From the Version City compilation. Late '90s NYC dub.)
MIA - Pull Up The People
Woody Guthrie - I Ain't Got No Home
Beck - Dead Melodies. I thought this album was really great in 1998. Now I am not so sure, which probably has a lot to do with the whole scientology thing and everything isnce Midnight Vultures being exceedingly boring.
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