This is my 2005 year end post. If you're interested, my 2003 year end post is here, and my 2004 year end post is here. A bizarre attempt to narrate both through the viewpoint of a broken cell phone is here.
Before I begin, I would just like to say that I hold the microphone like a grudge. (Best hip-hop video ever, maybe, except what the hell is Flava Flav doing?) I would also like to warn everyone that what follows is to some extent an exercise in Narcissism, and if you just come here to read about GSOC, you're more than welcome to skip it.
2005 was like 2004 in the sense that it was an extended experiment in liminality. I walked all over New York City. I spent a lot of time alone. I spent a lot of time feeling pretty miserable about my interactions with people i care about. I spent a lot of time in my parents' apartment watching TV. Some upsetting shit happened, and i spent large periods of time being depressed.
An entire city got wiped off the map of the United States. Bush got reinaugurated and I made an ass of myself in DC and my friends got tear-gassed and there was a really long traffic jam outside philadelphia and we shared our twizzlers with Stacy in the next car over, who was trying to get to dance lessons in Broomhall. There were earthquakes and bombings and NLRB decisions and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, and lots of people write a lot of incisive and not so incisive things about the racialization of catastrophe which it would be inappropriate for me to attempt to summarize here.
I got into grad school. I started grad school. Grad school went on strike. I am still trying to finish my papers. More on the strike below.
I moved to Brooklyn. I spent long hours walking all over Western Brooklyn and up through Prospect Park and across bridges and over canals. I spent large amounts of time in neihborhoods i'd barely ever heard of in the previous sixteen years I'd lived in New York. I saw the Pixies. And the New Pornographers, actually. And MIA. And The Go! Team. And Sleater-Kinney, again. These were all enjoyable.
I found people in NYC with whom i could actually hang out. This was so important for me, particularly last winter and spring when everything was very nebulous and scary.
I found a job for the summer. Well, ok, i was given a job by a very generous Marxist feminist cultural theorist. I spent 20 hours a week poring through St. Clair Drake's papers at the Schomburg and reading through some incredible notes about the livs of "mixed-race" children in post World-War II Britain. It was often overwhelming, but It felt really good to be working and like i was finally starting to move forward with life after months spent on my parents' couch acquainting myself with "Buffy The Vampire Slayer."
A day after i started grad school I was in the union office at an organizing committe meeting, pulling a Josh, i guess, trying to figure out the UAW and NYU and teaching myself how to organize again after not really doing very much of it in any serious and committed way since the September 2003 strike ended. Academic stuff was/is frustrating. I am still, as I write this, trying to finish papers. I think part of the reason this is taking me so long, besides general burnout, is a fear of handing anything substantove in, of being evaluated on my work when i don't feel like I'm capable of producing the kind of work i want to do. And my cohort of first-years is split on the strike. They read this, and I don't intend it in any way as a slight on them, but I also don't really think this blog is the best place for this conversation, so I won't write more, but it's been rough for me, and, I imagine, for them as well.
The Julian calendar is a fairly arbitrary unit of measuring time. While it marks a full rotation of the earth around the sun (more or less,) the dates on which it begins and ends don't really correspond to any otherwise important point in the cycle. Nevertheless, this being a year-end blog post, I'll bow to convention and accede to hegemonic discourses of periodization. So I will conclude by saying that given how fucked up this year has been on a global scale, I feel a lot better about my life right now, without wanting to jinx anything, than I did on December 31, 2004. I'm feeling hopeful about the future, and I'm looking forward to seeing what 2006 holds, (including and in addition to a lot of hotel contract expiration dates.) That seems like enough for now.
[We now return you to your regular levels of blog narcissism]
Saturday, December 31, 2005
Wednesday, December 28, 2005
of strikes, settlements, and longues dureés
The TWU and the MTA have settled their contract.
Today marks the beginning of the eighth week of GSOC's strike at NYU.
I'm under the impression that this is now, entering its eighth week, likely the longest job action at a private university in the history of the graduate student labor movement, unless one of those campaigns in the '70s involved a protracted stoppage that I've never heard of.
The 1995-1996 Yale grade strike, in which the administration and professors all to happy to do Levin's dirty work threatened their students with the same shit Sexton threatened us with - the loss of teaching positions for the spring semester, a.k.a. a lockout, began on December 8th and ended on January 15th '96 after the administration put three women - leaders of the union (two of whom were international students and two of whom were women of color) through kangaroo court show trials threatening possible deportation for the international students and a similar end to graduate study for the third woman and, indeed, any teacher who continued to withhold fall semester grades.
The grade strike was a watershed moment in Yale's labor history, but also in the history of the academic labor movement. It's generally recorded as a loss, in which the union was taken by surprise by the brutal response of liberal faculty and progressive historians and theorists all too willing to become union busting Yeshiva-style managerial agents when they believed that their own power and prestige might be threatened by the specter of collective bargaining. But it was also a moment which, by some accounts, profoundly changed the way that GESO organized and helped to rekindle the gradate student labor movement across the country. By one account, what became GSOC began after a couple NYU grad students went up to New Haven for the 1996 "People's Graduation" on the green, with Jesse Jackson and puppets, talked to GESO folks, and realized that they needed a union too.
So now we're heading into a semester in which many may find themselves locked out of teaching positions and forced to work multiple jobs, or take out large loans in order to stay in grad school and/or remain in the country. I feel a little weird, because as a first year student, I'm not at risk - assuming I finishing my papers from last semester, which is what I've been spending all of break thus far attempting unsuccesfully to do. But I will do everything i possibly can, rat or no rat, to continue this fight and build this movement. And now i need to get back to work.
Today marks the beginning of the eighth week of GSOC's strike at NYU.
I'm under the impression that this is now, entering its eighth week, likely the longest job action at a private university in the history of the graduate student labor movement, unless one of those campaigns in the '70s involved a protracted stoppage that I've never heard of.
The 1995-1996 Yale grade strike, in which the administration and professors all to happy to do Levin's dirty work threatened their students with the same shit Sexton threatened us with - the loss of teaching positions for the spring semester, a.k.a. a lockout, began on December 8th and ended on January 15th '96 after the administration put three women - leaders of the union (two of whom were international students and two of whom were women of color) through kangaroo court show trials threatening possible deportation for the international students and a similar end to graduate study for the third woman and, indeed, any teacher who continued to withhold fall semester grades.
The grade strike was a watershed moment in Yale's labor history, but also in the history of the academic labor movement. It's generally recorded as a loss, in which the union was taken by surprise by the brutal response of liberal faculty and progressive historians and theorists all too willing to become union busting Yeshiva-style managerial agents when they believed that their own power and prestige might be threatened by the specter of collective bargaining. But it was also a moment which, by some accounts, profoundly changed the way that GESO organized and helped to rekindle the gradate student labor movement across the country. By one account, what became GSOC began after a couple NYU grad students went up to New Haven for the 1996 "People's Graduation" on the green, with Jesse Jackson and puppets, talked to GESO folks, and realized that they needed a union too.
So now we're heading into a semester in which many may find themselves locked out of teaching positions and forced to work multiple jobs, or take out large loans in order to stay in grad school and/or remain in the country. I feel a little weird, because as a first year student, I'm not at risk - assuming I finishing my papers from last semester, which is what I've been spending all of break thus far attempting unsuccesfully to do. But I will do everything i possibly can, rat or no rat, to continue this fight and build this movement. And now i need to get back to work.
Tuesday, December 27, 2005
good news from local 26 in Boston
(where i worked during the fall after college. From the Boston Globe:)
The president of the Boston hotel and restaurant workers union, Janice
Loux, said she is ''cautiously optimistic" she will reach agreements with two
new luxury hotel operators in Boston that could lead to the employment of
hundreds of union workers.
''My negotiations with InterContinental are, I
think, moving forward," Loux said. ''I think things have taken a positive
turn."
Loux cautioned that she is ''still engaged in a major boycott effort"
directed at the InterContinental Boston hotel and the luxury condos, both being
built at 500 Atlantic Ave. But, she said, ''I'm encouraged. I'm cautiously
optimistic."She declared a boycott in June, though the protest has not
affected construction of the shiny mirrored building on the Rose Fitzgerald
Kennedy Greenway.Both the InterContinental Boston hotel, scheduled to open
next fall, and the Mandarin Oriental Boston, under construction on Boylston
Street near the Prudential Center, have followed a pattern of new hotel
developers or operators and resisted making a commitment to hire only union
workers.An InterContinental executive confirmed that discussions between the
hotel and Unite Here, a national union that includes hotel and restaurant
workers, resumed early this month, for the first time since Oct. 12.
''The hotel's intention is to continue good-faith discussions with the union in early
January 2006," said Charlotte Wood, senior manager for corporate communications
for InterContinental Hotels Group, based in Atlanta.Wood said the hotel and union have ''a better understanding of each other's interests," adding that the company is ''committed to treating its employees with dignity and respect."
The Mandarin Oriental is two years away from opening. But Loux is
insisting that workers there also be allowed to choose whether to join the union
under her terms. No one from Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group, of Hong Kong, could
be reached for comment. The hotel is being developed by CWB Boylston
LLC.
Loux said she is in talks with the management of Mandarin Oriental
hotels. She again said she was ''cautiously optimistic" but said the situation
is ''not quite in as good shape as InterContinental," from the union's point of
view.''I am the eternal optimist," Loux said.
Loux said that since she became president of the union in 1997, she has been successful in almost every case in securing at least a so-called card-check neutrality agreement. That sets up rules that allow workers to organize and hold a vote on whether they want to affiliate with her union, Boston Hotel Employees & Restaurant Employees Union, Local 26.
Syracuse Adjuncts vote for union recognition
In addition, Iannuzzi noted the campaign was "without rancor" and commended
Syracuse University administrators for maintaining neutrality. "We look forward
to sitting down with the adjuncts and the University and negotiating a fair
contract."
About 650 adjuncts – any adjunct instructors who taught in the Fall
2005, Summer 2005 or anytime in the 2004-05 academic year – were eligible to
vote in the representation election. NYSUT expects the NLRB to formally certify
the election results in 10 days.
Sunday, December 25, 2005
I dream of GSOC
Strange dream last night in which I was playing some sort of comparative colonialism trivia gane with an anonymous GSOC organizer who was really oribably an amalgam of several different people. It got interrupted by a phone call from my dad, which woke me up. I don't remember the specifics of the game at all.
Also, at some point last night i dreamt I was at a Wowz show thanking Simon for sending me Cool Dump, which I still need to write something about, but not until i've finished this friggin paper.
Also, at some point last night i dreamt I was at a Wowz show thanking Simon for sending me Cool Dump, which I still need to write something about, but not until i've finished this friggin paper.
Graeber on Buffy
Traditional vampire movies are a variation. In a way, they are ultimately
about the failure of the French Revolution--which was supposed to kill off all
those bloodsucking aristocrats in their castles and usher in a rational world of
liberty, equality, fraternity and enlightened commercial self-interest. Of
course it didn't work. The Count refuses to stay dead. Because deep inside, the
movies suggest, we don't really want him to. Eroticized cruelty and domination
keep resurfacing because they are rooted in the very nature of our desires.
Again, the proof is in the audience.
Yet Buffy not only avoids such sadistic
pleasures, it openly mocks the underlying morality:
Buffy: (Trying to bluff her way into a fundamentalist church) You
know, I just... I woke up and I looked in the mirror and I thought, hey! What's
with all this sin? I need to change! I'm... I'm dirty. I'm... Bad, with the sex,
and the envy and that loud music us kids listen to nowadays. (Blank stares.)
(Sigh.) Oh, I just suck at undercover. Where's Ken? (Kicks down door.)
In fact, its moral premise is precisely the opposite. Vampire-slaying has
to be kept secret. As a result, almost everyone in Sunnydale believes Buffy and
company are juvenile delinquents: violent, lazy, irresponsible, disobedient.
Bad. In reality, they are almost unimaginably self-sacrificing and good. In this
sense, Buffy is a kind of anti-horror.
The godless cosmology is something that's been developing for a long time,
across anything from superhero comic books to Dungeons and Dragons. What I
really want to draw attention to, however, is the underlying ethic. It would be
hard to imagine a healthier one. People--most people, anyway--mean well, but
being good is difficult (Buffy characters are always fretting over whether they
really did the right thing) and power tends to make you stupid or insane. It's a
difficult ethos to maintain in an adventure fantasy. After all, the whole point
of such fantasies is, usually, to fabricate a situation where there is an
obvious right thing to do--even more, where that right thing involves sorts of
violent behavior that would otherwise be wrong. Therein lies the pleasure. It's
not that Buffy doesn't do this: We are still talking about a show about
teenagers killing demons. But even the fantasy element has a sort of wistful
quality.
If nothing else, Buffy reminds us how much '60-style youth rebellion was
premised on an assumption of security and prosperity: Why put up with all this
stodginess when life could be so good? Today's rebellious youth, rather, are
reduced to struggling desperately to keep hell from entirely engulfing the
earth. Such, I suppose, is the fate of a generation that has been robbed of its
fundamental right to dream of a better world. The very notion of being able to
take part in a relatively democratically organized group of comrades, engaged in
a struggle to save humanity from its authoritarian monsters, is now itself a
wild utopian fantasy--not just a means to one. But cynics take note: If the
mushrooming success of Buffy means anything, it's that this is one fantasy which
surprising numbers of the Slacker Generation do have.
-In These Times, 1998
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