Just learned that my sophomore year roomate Brian is now a major league soccer player. That's pretty awesome. He even has a whole article written just about him. Wow.

Looking out my parents' window, i saw a pair of mourning doves sitting on the air conditioner of the apartment next door. Cool.

Really not what i need to read right now.

Pitchfork gives some props to Desmond Dekker, who deserves them. Given the multitude of Dekker comps already available, I'm a bit skeptical about the need for a new one, though most tend to pad the last few tracks with mildly execrable late '80s/early 90's covers Dekker did of his own work with the remnants of The Specials. This comp seems to be no exception to this trend, though it does have some stuff on it that I've never heard before.

Serendipity

From the Chicago Defender, August 3, 1946...

Yale Culture Unsullied By Use In New Haven

NEW HAVEN, CONN -- The sweet light of reason emanating from the accumulation of culture at Yale university, seems well confined behind the ivy walls, according to a survey of race relations and community conditions in this city which is the home of the university.

Negroes find that "race prejudice is very subtle and it slaps you in the face when you least expect it."

Rev. R. A. G. Foster, pastor of the 126-year-old Varick African Methodist Episcopal Zion church, said that Yale seems to exert little influence on city politics and has only refined racial prejudice.

Housing for the 7,500 Negro residents is bad, they testify, and has been since World War I.

The percentage of Negroes in skilled and professional jobs is inordinately small. There are four school teachers, two social workers in state employ, two clerks in city offices and three or four personnel workers in industry.

There are three policemen, no city firemen, no bus or trolley car drivers.

"Integration Genuine"

The Winchester Arms company, however, employs 900 colored workers or about 17 per cent of the laboring force. The publicity director claims that "integration is genuine."

Prices, rents and accomodations are major problems. Mayor William Celentano, elected "by an Italian awakening" has set up a "Fair Rent Committee" but it has been handicapped by lack of state action.

Sections of New Haven, especially that near Yale's New Haven hospital, "are cesspools of disease and crime" according to the mayor.

To examine the school system and make recommendations for improvements, he revealed, a university expert has been called in. He is Dr. Julian Butterworth--of Cornell University.

We'll skip the obvious and cheap correlations and instead attempt to historicize this document. This is a portrait of a New Haven still relatively untouched by the later throes of the Second Great Migration, which would see the African-American population of the city surge by the end of the 1960s. This New Haven has not yet experienced the upheavals of Richard Lee's urban renewal projects and "Kremlin on the Green." And this is also written from a genteel perspective apparently sympathetic to the proto-"culture of poverty" discourse of "disease" and "crime" infesting the Hill and Oak Street which could only be expunged by the razing of an entire working-class neighborhood and its replacement with a highway to nowhere, which would only intensify housing woes into the 1960s and 1970s. (Also note the reference to Varick AME Zion, now David Lee's church, which i also found a great deal of mention of in the notes in the back of the Baltimore Afro-American during the war years. This isn't surprising, as the church, as the article notes, has been around and important for a long time.) I find this article interesting because it fills in some of the blanks that Deborah Elkin refers to in her dissertation, suggesting not only what kinds of discrimination the few black workers at Yale faced on the job, (the most prestigious were often bartenders in frat-houses) but also how the middle class African-American luminaries of the city understood the university's role in city politics entering into the Lee years, in which the university would play a very direct role in much of the new cartography and dislocation.

The folks at the Village Voice, the increasingly corporatized "alternative newsweekly" to end all "alternative newsweeklys" are poised to strike to defend themselves from massive managerial takebacks. Gawker carries the whole press release. These workers are members of UAW Local 2110, the same local which includes the TAs and adjuncts at NYU and those TAs organizing at Columbia. Here's the press release, via Gawker.

Village Voice Workers Poised To Strike

NEW YORK: Faced with a harsh and insulting proposal from management, workers at The Village Voice — the nation’s largest alternative weekly — are prepared to walk off the job for the first time in the newspaper’s history.

As tense negotiations continue and a contract deadline draws near, the Voice’s salespeople, designers, photographers, editors, and writers are united in the face of management’s attempt to roll back hard-won benefits, undermine their bargaining power, and erode their ability to support their families.

In negotiations for a new contract to replace the agreement
that expires at midnight on June 30, Voice management has:

· demanded that workers pay more for their health insurance and switch
to a less generous health care plan.

· offered meager wage increases ($15 a week) paid for by reducing
contributions to workers’ 401(k) plans — a “raise” that is unlikely to outpace
inflation for most workers.

· and insisted that terms for work on the Voice’s website be determined in
one-on-one deals between individual writers and the corporation, not through the collective
bargaining that is required in a union shop.

The Voice, which will mark its 50th anniversary this fall, has long been an advocate for social justice—and particularly the rights of workers—in New York City and elsewhere.
Accepting an unjust contract is not how Local 2110 intends to celebrate the paper’s 50th
birthday. And its members are prepared to remind management that there’s no
party if workers aren’t invited, respected, and fairly compensated.

Any and all coverage will be much appreciated. Please contact Ken Switzer, kswitzer@villagevoice.com, 646-752-1007, for more information. Thanks.

British vs Monkeys

Best Journalism Ever.