Strangest Fortune Ever?

"The night life is for you."

No Hugs

The final question of the evening came from Andre -----, a student senator and a graduate student, who asked, “Why do you feel entitled to hug everyone?”
- Washington Square News. 9/28/2006 (surname witheld to protect the innocent.)

This song is about John Sexton. It is dedicated to andre, but he holds no culpability in it. For that, blame me and the ghost of Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes.

"No Hugs"
To the Tune of "No Scrubs, of course."

John Sexton tells a lot of lies
and he's a union buster
always talkin' about what he wants
no negotiations, just impasse
so (no)
I don't want your embrace
no I don't wanna give you mine
and no I don't wanna meet you nowhere
no I don't want none of your slime and no
Chorus:

I don't want no hugs
when a hug is a gesture of patriarchy
and I simply won't abide
all the times he lied
trying to intimidate me
I don't want no hugs
when a hug is a gesture of patriarchy
and I simply won't abide
all the times he lied
trying to intimidate me

Yeah your hugs freakin me
and your logic's kinda weak
and i know that you cannot approach me
cuz I'm teachin' my class and you treat me like trash
Sittin' in Bobst on your rich ass

So (no)
I don't want your embrace
no I don't wanna give you mine
and no I don't wanna meet you nowhere
especially at an innapropriate time and no

I don't want no hugs
when a hug is a gesture of patriarchy
and I simply won't abide
all the times he lied
trying to intimidate me
I don't want no hugs
when a hug is a gesture of patriarchy
and I simply won't abide
all the times he lied
trying to intimidate me

If I'm on the picket line walking
Oh Sexton I'm talking to you
If you thrive on megalomaniacal drama
Oh Sexton I'm talking to you
Yeah we have a union but you show no love
Oh Sexton I'm talking to you
Wanna quiet me with no contract
oh no I don't want no hugs
No hugs
No hugs
No No
No hugs
No no no no
No no
Chorus (until fade)

It's been a long time (since anything other than blockquotes, it seems.) I shouldn't have left you without a dope beat to step to.

My apologies. I've been busy with a combination of GSOC, coursework, and, our group research project on piracy. The current state of my piece of the project proposal is below:

"The University of Pirates and the Pirate University: Academic Knowledge Production, Intellectual Property, and Utopia,"

The neoliberal university's position as a site of knowledge production and relationship to the licensing of the products of publicly funded research as intellectual property to be farmed out, often, to partnerships with private corporations, means that for academic capitalism, production and "piracy" are now increasingly intertwined. I propose a project which understands the current predicaments of so-called cognitive capitalism, (see Nick Dyer Witheford's essay in the European Journal of Higher Arts Education : http://www.ejhae.elia-artschools.org/Issue2/1b-dyer.htm) intellectual property, and academic labor. I will rely specifically on theorizations of immaterial labor by autonomist marxists like Dyer Witheford, Negri, Lazzarato, Tiziana Terranova (particularly this interview with Marc Bousquet: http://www.metamute.org/en/Recomposing-the-University et alii, and on some case studies of recent struggles within and against the global university's logics of ownership and work. I will also look at attempts to envision a nomad space of knowledge production against and/or outside of the post Bayh-Dole patent machine - what Dyer Witheford theorizes as the pirate colonies on the margins of David Noble's digital diploma mills. (yarr.)

Clearly, it needs work, but i think it's headed in a productive direction.

I haven't had a good night's sleep all week and i'm not really sure why. I just toss and turn and never feel rested. And i have these bizarre, surreal, intimate dreams which have been haunting me for the last couple of nights and i don't really get where they're coming from and why now. And right now i'm exhausted and
feeling mildly unproductive, not to mention a bit hungry. My major accomplishment of the day was buying new shoes - which boast - instead of gapoing holes where the heel should be, strong rubber soles as yet uneroded by the seven miles I walk every day. Also I think I have a better sense of the organizing that has to happen in my department, so I feel good about that. Really, though, I kind of just want to find something soft right now and lie on it for a few days, but i have what looks to be a busy weekend followed by a busy week, so that's a pipe dream. I'd really like to get out of the city for a little while, to go somewhere where leaves change colors and fall air is actually crisp. One of those moments where learning to drive probably would have been a good idea. But I am thinking maybe i should wait until things are a little more settled, until Fall has fallen a bit more, until I've finished an incomplete or two. Argh.

No contract, No fucked up hugs at 5 in the morning.

Susan Valentine, GSOC spokeswoman and a fifth-year graduate student, asked Sexton if he thought it was wrong that graduate students at public universities can form unions. Private universities such as NYU are not required to recognize graduate student unions. GSOC was on strike for about six months to pressure the administration to recognize its union.

“I think it’s a different context,” Sexton said. “Let’s not get into this conversation here. The university has made its decision.”

Several GSOC members then responded by shouting, “We are the university!”

It's agapaic

"He looks like Paris Hilton."- GSOC member on John Sexton

Edit: fixed typo in title

The Harder They Come

Yale's endowment "skyrockets" 22.9 percent to $18 Billion.

"I'm happy that the largest employer in the region is financially healthy, but I believe that they need to take another look at their self-imposed spending rule and apply more money toward their daily operations," Local 35 President Bob Proto said.

Definitely the first time i can remember the YDN quoting union folks on the annual "Yale's even richer" article...

Recently, Pitchfork writers compiled what they felt were the 200 best songs of the 1960s, a daunting task if ever there were one, given the explosion of cultural production accompanying the ferment of social movements, spontaneous revolts, protracted struggles against regimes of racialized brutality, etc. It's a good list, bust there's some stuff that i find annoying. For instance, Charles Mingus gets on the list with "Solo Dancer" from The Black Saint and The Sinner Lady, one of my all time favorite records, but everyone who's ever listened to that album knows that the best part is actually in "Group Dancers," when the kickass flutes come in. And while I'm glad that Jamaican ska and rocksteady songs like Desmond Dekker's incomparable "Israelites" and the more formulaic but nevertheless great "007 (Shanty Town)" make the list (the former in the top 10,) I can't help but wonder if they wouldn't have selected The Paragons' "The Tide Is High" had Blondie not covered it and think that The Skatalites' "Confucius" and Don Drummond's "Man in the Street" should feel a bit slighted. Sam Cooke's "A Change Is Gonna Come" is #3, and that seems about right to me. "God Only Knows" is #1, which i can understand - it's an amazing song and it would probably still give me chills every time i heard it if i had never heard that bizarre Mandy Moore/Michael Stipe cover at the beginning of Saved. My main gripe, for the moment, at least is that "Tracks of My Tears" only comes in at 87. It's not that I don't like Led Zeppelin's "Dazed and Confused," (#11) I just like "Tracks of My Tears" like twelve million times more, and it's certainly a better song than, say, Dick Dale's "Misirlou," which wouldn't factor in had it not been fetishized and resuscitated by Quentin Tarantino, much like John Travolta's career.

Alright, that was a thoroughly useless post. time to read about some communists.

Oh yes - Shana Tova, folks.