stay where you are

Ahem. You watching, Alek?

(This is from the final portland show. I'm swiping it from Youtube.)

Best Song Ever.

I'm glad they played it live on at least one show of the farewell tour - and it looks liek they played it in Philly too...

Julianne Shepherd gives one of the better S-K career restrospectives I've seen in the last few weeks:

Though onstage banter was rare that last day at the Crystal Ballroom, Carrie Brownstein punctuated their final show by telling the audience, "It's such a privilege to play for you tonight." Time will tell the impact and longevity, but for over a decade, the privilege was ours.

Who Protects Us From You pt 2

On the corner of Tillary Street and the Flatbush Avenue Extension, there's a building surrounded by police barricades. I walk past it every day on my way over the bridge on my long trek from Sunset Park to Manhattan, one of the few things that's kept me sane over the last year. Today I looked at the barriers and noticed that they all had "New York Stock Exchange" written on them.

"Wow," I though to myself. "This would make a good photograph and dramatize the linkages between finance capital and the hopeland security state." So I whipped out my cell phone and took a picture, but it came out bad, so I hit "discard."

Suddenly I heard shouting. A police officer - usually stationed near the barricades, had jumped out of his NYPDgolfmobile and was screaming at me.

"Did you just take a picture? Did you take a picture of the barricade?"

I was stunned. I knew that the NYPD had been attempting to ban photography in the subways (unsucessfully,) but we weren't in the subway and there was no way anything i was doing should have been grounds for suspicion - leaving aside whether or not what the cop did was legal.

The officer demanded to see my picture and to know why I took it. I should have said "what gives you the right to ask," or demanded to see his badge number or something, but instead i basically went limp and complied and then he walked away and i turned towards the bridge and walked away, anger and frustration and a feeling of violation seeping into my thoughts and manifesting themselves in a panicked fury and overwhelming sense of powerlessness.

Walking over the bridge and staring out at the city, I wanted to throw my umrella over the fence, or smash it and then throw it over, or scream at the top of my lungs. I wanted to go back to the cop and yell at him - calll him a fascist, whatever.

But instead i kept walking, and seethed, and stared at my cellular phone, which now apparently doubles as a weapon of mass destruction.

Would he have let me go if I weren't a middle class white man?

amnesia

I've been having trouble remembering things today.

The name of a friend's girfriend.

That Yale prof who tried to have someone expelled a feew years ago for union activity.

faces to match the names of the namedropped in sanitized fast food burrito stations.

I think i'm getting old.

Multimedia message

assorted labor news.

I haven't posted anything about the Unite-HERE hotel campaign in a while, so i will link to this SF Chronicle article on the possibility of another strike - the first since the 2004 lockout ended.

The strike authorization is almost a given. But no labor action is imminent, said Mike Casey, president of Local 2 of the hotel workers' union, Unite Here. Instead, the union wants to reach a contract agreement by Labor Day, Casey said Wednesday.

"That is our hope. I don't know if we are going to get it done or not,'' Casey said. "If we don't, there is going to be a train wreck.''

Also, the janitors at the University of Miami approve a contract!