fulfilling a long-overdue promise thanks to the magic of packing my life into boxes yet again:

"if you steal my seat, I might flash people, but maybe that's the place UOC needs to get."
-Ana , September, 2003

About 10,000 hotel and casino workers in Atlantic City, NJ walked off the job yesterday. In San Francisco, which is where i've been for the last week, the 1400 who struck four hotels wednesday have been joined by another 2600 who've been locked out by the hotel association. Very soo, another 8,000or so hotel workers could join them in Los Angeles and D.C. Luckily, UNITE HERE has a visionary and solid strategy to win these fights as well as the ones looming on the horizon in 2006 and organize the entire industry, which has spent the last three years employing fictitious claims of hardship and austerity in an attempt to legitimate a massive speed-up and attempting to render workers' voices silent through massive consolidation. For more on the hotel strike/lockout, see Hotel Workers United.

I broke my fast with some Ollies Steamed Vegetable Dumplings and a quart, yes, a quart, of pumkin pie tasti-d-lite. Yom Kippur was somewhat unsuccesful for me this year. Instead of revaluating my life and my interactions with other people, all i could really concentrate on, besides being really, really hungry, was how much shit i need to do between now and tomorrow morning. Well, that and sex. And (i cannot tell a lie,) the ewok subaltern, the imperial politics of translation and gold-plated technomagical subjugation, and the imperial politics by which the film's sound engineer, Ben Burtt, created the ewok language through the appropriation and imitation of peasant languages of central China. The process by which Burtt collects "exotic" sounds, ascribing to subhuman aliens the tongues of the wallersteinian global periphery to pepper the sonic canvas upon which George Lucas's tale of pulp fantasy rebellion is inscribed, is thus problematic, to say the least. Now that i've eaten, i really need to start cleaning my room and packing my shit up, so this is probably going to be it for posting for a while.



Hard to believe it's been two years since this.



Addendum: songs of the day.

The Go-Betweens: "Spring Rain"

Sleater-Kinney, "A Quarter To Three"

Augustus Pablo: "East Of The River Nile"

The Replacements: "Skyway"

Husker Du: "Sorry Somehow"

First a little commodity fetishism: I just got The Arcade Fire's debut full-legnth, Funeral, in the mail, and it deserves all the hype it's been getting on pitchfork and elsewhere. I also finally found my copies of the score and The Grey Album (they were on the floor behind my computer,) about which i don't have anything insightful to say other than that "Family Business" and "Zealots" are great songs and that DM's version of "Change Clothes," recut with George Harrison's "Piggies" is about ten million times better than the original. I'm pretty excited about the release this coming tuesday of both Interpol's second LP, Antics, and Talib Kweli's second solo album (and third full legnth since Mos Def and Talib Kweli Are Black Star), The Beatiful Struggle. But what i'm even more excited/worried about is the news, via pitchfork yesterday that Mos Def himself, whose verse on "Respiration" is classic and whose solo debut was absolutely incredible is going to release his long awaited second solo album, New Danger, a mere five years after Black On Both Sides. Some argue that Mos Def has lost it since 1999, as evinced by a somewhat spotty series of singles and compilation tracks - although he still managed to upstage Kweli with the best single verse on Train of Thought, "This Means You"'s meditation on the racialized geography of post-Giuliani New York. Anyway, Alek be damned! (And i even kind of liked Brown Sugar.) I'm excited by this news and psyched to hear this record.



I've been wallowing in Pre-K nostalgia with the release of the star-wars trilogy on dvd and remebering afternoons spent in David Beckman's den in Pennsylvania watching the opening scenes of jedi over and over again and comparing his bearded collie, Sammy, to falco the luck dragon in Wolfgang Petersen's film of the Michael Ende novel, The Neverending Story. I could write a long cultural studies-inflected essay about all the problems inherent in having the bad aliens speak a language based on Quetchua, or about Ewoks as Zerzanian primitivist revolutionaries paradoxically enamored with the promise of capitalism, technology, and robot gods with british accents, but i have too much other stuff i ought to be doing instead.



I'm flying out to San Francisco on Sunday for a training for the job, then moving to Boston for at least the next two and a half months. Meanwhile, the world is ending with a bang, Allawi is stumping for Bush as the heads roll, and Rumsfeld and the state department are feuding over how many people in their second most recent colonial acquisition (i haven't forgotten Haiti even if they have) will get to vote in the uppcoming sham of an election.



Kind of makes one want to move to mexico for a year. But everyone else i know already thought of that, and then they al wind up in DC anyway. Time to go for a walk and do some atoning.

as if you needed more reasons to hate wal-mart

In which the securitized state takes a wild ride

Are we really supposed to believe that Cat Stevens is a national security risk?



Meanwhile, and much more importantly, an iraqi woman among those detained at Abu Ghraib by American Occupation forces speaks out about the abuses she was forced to endure.

Alazawi says that American guards then made her stand with her face against the wall for 12 hours, from noon until midnight. Afterwards they returned her to her cell. "The cell had no ceiling. It was raining. At midnight they threw something at my sister's feet. It was my brother Ayad. He was bleeding from his legs, knees and forehead. I told my sister: 'Find out if he's still breathing.' She said: 'No. Nothing.' I started crying. The next day they took away his body."

The US military later issued a death certificate, seen by the Guardian, citing the cause of death as "cardiac arrest of unknown etiology". The American doctor who signed the certificate did not print his name, and his signature is illegible. The body was returned to the family four months later, on April 3, after the Abu Ghraib torture scandal broke. The family took photographs of the body, also seen by the Guardian, which revealed extensive bruising to the chest and arms, and a severe head wound above the left eye.

After Ayad's body had been taken away, Alazawi says that she and 18 other Iraqi detainees were put in a minibus inside the military compound. "The Americans told us: 'Nobody is going to sleep tonight.' They played scary music continuously with loud voices. As soon as someone fell asleep they started beating on the door. It was Christmas. They kept us there for three days. Many of the US soldiers were drunk."

Finally, after a US guard broke her shoulder as she left the lavatory, Alazawi and her surviving siblings were transferred - first to a police academy in Baghdad's interior ministry and then, on January 4 2004, to Abu Ghraib prison.

HOW THE FUCK DID I NOT KNOW ABOUT THIS?

Today's tracks, in honor of Lauryn Hill's return to humanity, are as follows



1.The Fugees, "Cowboys,"

2.Mos Def, "Mathematics"

3.Reflection Eternal ft. Mos Def, "This Means You"

4.The Fugees, "Fu-gee-la"

5.Lauryn Hill, "Everything is Everything"

6.Common, "The Sixth Sense."