kick your door down

Holy crap!

John Sexton is the 7th most loathsome New Yorker

New York Press

7 John Sexton
University president
What’s worse than a bunch of
over-educated, privileged crybaby Felicity wannabes? Their disciplinarian daddy,
of course. John Sexton helms NYU, that beacon of Downtown real estate and
strike-busting. Sexton gave the rising princes of capitalism at the Stern School
of Business a lesson in how to break the back of underpaid workers when he
refused to negotiate with the Graduate Student Organizing Committee. The private
university grad student union’s contract had expired, and Sexton’s stonewalling
led to a November strike.
Picket lines and petitions led to cancelled
classes. Some co-eds went keg wild—in support of the strikers. The strikers
believed that they had won the day. But Sexton, the Andrew Carnegie of Academia,
wouldn’t budge instead issuing an “or else.” The union and its members claimed
Sexton’s tactic was proof of their power. The strike is ongoing, yet unlike the
Transit Workers Union walkout, NYU’s newsworthiness fizzled quickly. With a
reduced workforce, the university, whose tentacles have spread from the East to
West Village, apparently hasn’t taken over enough of Downtown Manhattan, and
is—if you can believe it—looking to expand. While the school administration
claims the undergraduate enrollment is shrinking, and therefore revenue, NYU
dorms and classrooms are sprouting like poisoned mushrooms over the two
villages. One such project has the villagers brandishing torches and pitchforks:
A 26-story dorm at the corner of Fourth Avenue and East 12th Street. That’s the
site of the soon-to-be-former 159-year-old St. Ann’s Church (the Landmarks
Commission caved into NYU and denied landmark designation). The building would
be the tallest in the East Village. If you were wondering whatever happened to
the Saint and the Palladium, the city’s two best-ever nightclubs, it’s easy:
NYU. Lower Third Avenue now looks like Upper Third Avenue, thanks to all the
dorm highrises. A recent $200 million gift, earmarked for an institute dedicated
to the research of ancient civilizations, will further pad the pockets of a
school administration that has already eaten everything around Washington
Square.

The rest of the list is problematic. Mike Piazza isn't loathsome at all, except to the extent that he's a republican. And Roger Toussaint? Please. Roger Toussaint ranked higher than Bllomberg AND Pataki is a joke.

the clap pt 2

So when i was walking to the picket line this morning, up Bowery from the Manhattan Bridge, out of one ofthe restauraunt supply stores came a familiar song - the early synth-pop hit "popcorn." It's been in my head ever since. Read a brief history of it here.

I'd also like to announce that I just downloaded "Separate Ways (Worlds Apart)" as a ringtone. I'm sure, to paraphrase Malcolm Reynolds, that your days of not taking me seriously have finally reached a middle.

Thanks to all the respondents for their honest and diverse responses. I think part of the reason GSOC folks have such a strong aversion to the farmworker clap is that they think of it as an ahistoricized "power clap," to quote our unit chair, which sounds to me and probably others like corporate sensitivity jargon, Peter Drucker on Xanax. What the clap actually means, its history in the farmworker struggles and the Chicano movimiento, are evacuated in favor of what GSOCers percieve as empty groupthink.

So how do we change this, if that's what we decide we need to do? Does the farmworker clap constitute a useful means of connecting our strike and our union to other labor and social movement struggles? And is this a project we should even be embarking upon at this point?

Meeting Olympics

the clap

at a meeting tonight we were about to end with a farmworker clap when we got derailed by added administrative issues and then no one wanted to clap. There's a hostility to the UFW clap in GSOC which, coming from the Yale fight and from Unite HERE, where pretty much every meeting i was ever in ended with one, i find it frustrating. I don't know if the hostility comes from some sort of resistance to a percieved drinking of the proverbial koolaid supposedly exemplified by accelerated synchronous handclaps, or if there's a feeling that somehow we'd be missapropriating the legacy of Cesar Chavez, but I want to briefly argue here for said clap as a useful way to end meetings.

GSOC folks don't like cheerleading. They don't like being told that we're winning when it appears that things are more dire. Enthusiasm and energy sometimes get criticized for short-sightedness and/or evidence of stuff like white privilege, anti-intellectualism, and/or an inability to address some serious concerns in an effective way. I'm sympathetic to all of these critiques except for the anti-intellectualism one, which i in part find insulting and which the smarter, organizer part of me, assuming such a part indeed exists, thinks we need to take as a challenge to thing about and articulate what's at stake in our fight and what we are fighting for in better ways than we have thus far.

I don't see the handclap as a fascist gesture, an imposition of groupthink or an assertion of an artificial and false optimism. I see it as a way of committing ourselves to eachother once more as we end every meeting, of forcing ourselves to think about what happens in such meetings and what has to happen in terms of the struggle we're in, as a gesture of solidarity with other struggles and social movements, and because, from a very problematic formalist standpoint, they are a good way to bring meetings to a visible, audible, tactile end and move forward with on the ground organizing, a reminder that we don't actually win through meeting, but by all the work that happens in part in between the meetings, in the departments, on the streets, etc.

More on this later, maybe. Now it's back to Doreen Massey's For Space and then on to Wolfgang Schivelbusch's The Railway Journey.

But first, I want to open this question up to readers, particularly those involved in movement organizing or who've been in meetings where the farmworker handclap has been utilized. How do you feel about its efficacy? What does it do, or not do for you?